Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Cinéma & Cie is an international, peer-reviewed academic journal. The research areas of the journal include media history and theory and their relationship; the various intersections between technological, industrial and representational aspects; audiovisual heritage; reception and consumption; the links between different forms of audiovisual narrative, art and communication. Published twice a year (in Spring and Fall), the journal is structured in four different sections: – Thematic issue: usually the largest section, devoted to a specific topic. This section only accepts submissions in response to specific calls for essays that are advertised via the journal website; – Beyond Cinema: a section focused on innovative perspectives on the transformations in the field of film studies. Submissions are accepted only in response to the permanent call for essays advertised on the website; – Projects & Abstracts: the section details international research and noteworthy Ph.D. thesis projects or abstracts, recommended by supervisors; – Reviews: the section consists of significant essays, festivals, exhibitions, conferences and related content.
Saving the Past, Making History: Film Festivals and the Dynamics of Rediscovery
This article explores the impact of film festivals’ retrospective programming on the canons of global art cinema, wanting to contribute to a current trend in film scholarship exploring the relationship between film festivals and film histories. The argument proposed here is that, by recircling and mediating the latest film restorations and even taking ownership of specific restoration initiatives, film festivals have become key platforms for the rediscovery of so-called ‘film classics’, thus crucially contributing to shape the articulations and understanding of film histories. To this aim, the article gauges with the dynamics of cinematic rediscoveries through the theoretical prism of cultural memory studies, exploring how film festivals developed, between the early 1980s and the 1990s, a retrospective interest in the material body of the film historical past, and its preservation and restoration,acting as both arbiters and harbingers of what body of films become available once again and, eventually, studied by scholars, critics and students. By considering several institutional cases and the emergence of retrospective strands in some of the major A-list festivals, this article contends that these festivals have become essential ‘sites of passage’ to the contemporary ways of accessing and historicizing of the histories of global art cinema.
Copyright (c) 2024 Andrea Gelardi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Aesthetics of Violence and Online Visual Propaganda as Weapons in a Separatist Struggle: A Study of Cameroon’s Anglophone Crisis
Since September 7, 2017, the two English-speaking regions of Cameroon have been brutalised by a separatist struggle variously called the Ambazonia War, the NOSO war or the Anglophone crisis. This conflict which opposes some separatist armed groups and government forces has involved the use by each side, of online-based visual propaganda aimed at framing their opponents in a negative light and wooing both domestic audiences and the international community in favour of their respective causes. This determination to negatively frame the opposite camp has led not only to a war of gloomy images but also the recrudescence of an aesthetic of violence in the video-assisted propaganda of the warring parties. This aesthetics of violence has so far remained understudied. This paper seeks to fill this gap by examining how specific violent images have circumstantially been constructed, deconstructed and mobilised by both separatist and anti-separatist forces in this conflict to frame or counter-frame their opponent. Using a qualitative content analysis of relevant online videos/footage, semiotics, documentary analysis and critical observations, the paper specifically addresses three questions: What has been the role of visual-based propaganda in the Ambazonia war? How have the domestic and the foreign audiences received this visual propaganda? And how have international observers – such as news agencies, politics observatories and other world organisations – mediated in the war of images that opposes government and the armed separatist groups in Cameroon?
Copyright (c) 2024 Floribert Patrick C. Endong https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Video Activism and Activist Archiving: Collective Testimonies, Resilient Images and the Case of bak.ma
Video activism prominently advocates for human rights and justice by circulating records of abuses and state violence's impact on daily life. However, in the over-saturated online space, these images lose context amid constant sharing, demanding attention. Hence, organizing them within the framework of social struggles, resistance, and justice is crucial. In this context, digital activist archive initiatives (e.g., 858.ma 2018; labournet.tv 2011; Arkib Filem Rakyat 2023; B’Tselem 2012) not only make sense of the surplus of internet images but also act as a counter-practice that challenges the states’ official archiving practices and its claim of monopoly over history. Activist archiving practices wrest control away from established institutions, enabling the dissemination of alternative histories through images. As a result, these archives preserve the experiences of social groups ignored by official ideology and foster the proliferation of grassroots practices. Furthermore, the video activist archive emerges as an alternative platform that is generated collectively to reproduce knowledge and sociopolitical relations based on solidarity. This essay will center on a study of bak.ma - the digital media archive of social movements created following the Gezi Park protests (Istanbul, 2013). It seeks to examine how this archive constructs a social memory beyond state-approved knowledge and practices, achieved through decentralized and collective data collection that restores control of protest movements to the people. Additionally, this essay will also shed light on the challenges inherent in activist initiatives, encompassing issues like censorship, accessibility, the reproduction of knowledge, activist labor and sustainability.
Copyright (c) 2024 Sirin Fulya Erensoy, Ozge Celikaslan https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Inas Halabi’s We No Longer Prefer Mountains (2022). Creating an Artistic Counternarrative within the Druze Community in Israel/Palestine through Oral History and Fukeiron Methodologies
The article looks at the research methods that lie behind the film We No Longer Prefer Mountains (2022) by Palestinian artist Inas Halabi. The movie represents a counternarrative of the identity and political issues of the Druze community living in Israel, achieved from within through an immersive glimpse. The aim is to analyse the way the visual artist relies on specific methodologies (which are contextualized within the field of Palestinian studies) to build an alternative perspective on Druze history. On one side, the paper considers oral history as it is practiced in the film: a method to write history from below, to highlight the interconnections of individual and collective stories, and to exhibit forms of sumud (resistance) in everyday life. On the other, it focuses on fukeiron, a method of filming the landscape applied by Halabi to expose symbols of colonial control hidden in both natural and urban environments. Overall, the article thinks about the role that the artist can play and the way she can contribute to a militant and decolonial research from her particular position and application of specific methodologies.
Copyright (c) 2024 Giacomo Paci https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Revolution Unfolding: The Historical Present between ‘Real Time’ and Latency in Found Footage Filmmaking
The inextricable connection between uprisings and technologies of audiovisual recording and broadcasting, especially within an ecology of digital networks, suggests the possibility to follow events in ‘real time’. This paper asks how filmmakers explore the complexities of this notion—and the questions of spectatorship, temporality and mediation that are attached to it—by drawing on the an-archive of protest footage. It is especially interested in the ways in which found footage filmmaking manages to (re-)create a sense of the historical present without resorting to a flat presentism. How do filmmakers re- and deconstruct experiences of ‘real time’ and the fraught notion of immediacy it proposes? How do their narrations attempt to give shape to the openness of the present moment? And how do they negotiate the latent historicity of events? To approach these questions, the paper undertakes a close reading of two films, Fragments of a Revolution (anonymous, 2011) and Videograms of a Revolution (Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujică, 1992), thus drawing a connection between digital and analogue ‘guerilla images’.
Copyright (c) 2024 Johanna Laub https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Portrait of a Girly Girl: When Recording a Video Selfie is a Feminist Practice
YouTube, Instagram and TikTok are increasingly used today as tools of resistance and environments of expression. This paper will focus on feminist video-selfies that address stereotypes of the female body, status and behaviour and propose to ironically dismantle them. The article will consider issues of female networked presence and creativity by referring to early attempts to create a personal video channel, documented by Elisa Giardina Papa in her video artwork need ideas!?!PLZ!! (2011). The undercover presentation of political content will be discussed as an activist strategy, as in artist Addie Wagenknecht’s fake make-up tutorials, in which she actually gives instructions on how to protect oneself both online and offline. Video-selfies are widely shared on social platforms as a playful way to meditate on personal identity. This happens, for example, thanks to the social filters of the artist S()fia Braga, which allow users to freely experiment with unfathomable views of themselves and to interact with others in a performative way. All these examples use creative strategies to convey a critical message. While never discouraging physical protest, they offer another ground for activism and dissent, and the possibility of literally embodying them.
Copyright (c) 2024 Sofia Pirandello https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
"The Human Tide Mounts High”: Indymedia and Genoa’s G8 in 2001
Throughout this paper, I will focus on the media-documentation of Genoa’s G8 protests in 2001. More precisely, I will delve into the role of Indymedia Italia in the development of Genoa Social Forum’s Media Center, also referring to two of the most relevant videos produced by them and now collected in the online repository NGV – New Global Vision. In other words, I aim to highlight the aesthetic and political stances of a specific media collective during one of the most relevant historical events at the beginnings of the 21st Century.
Copyright (c) 2024 Diego Cavallotti https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Guerrilla Images: Archaeologies, Geographies, Aesthetics of Political Filmmaking and Videoactivism
Copyright (c) 2024 Kathrin Fahlenbrach, Giuseppe Previtali, Giacomo Tagliani https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Laura Kraicovich, Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest, London-New York: Verso 2021, pp. 224
Copyright (c) 2024 Laura Cesaro https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
From the Small Screen to the Big Screen: The Super8's Distribution of Sandokan TV series
‘From the small screen to the big screen’ proclaims the advertising text of the Super8’s of a television series distributed in 1979 by the German company Piccolo Film, emphasizing the novelty and the potential of format. The film is Sandokan, an Italian miniseries from 1976 directed by Sergio Sollima and starring the Indian actor Kabir Bedi as the exotic protagonist of Salgari’s famous adventure. This contribution maps the European and global success of the series and its media format’s history, focusing in particular on Super8’s distribution. It retraces Super8 ‘reduction prints’ in different languages by relying on film catalogues from the seventies and on sources gathered from platforms such as Imdb and Ebay (where collectors trade Super8) and interviews to ex-employees and owners of former Super8’s distribution companies in Italy and Germany. The paper considers the geographical circulation of Sandokan’s Super8 editions to investigate Sandokan’s figure beyond its literary origins. Super8’s history shows an unexplored relation between media broadcasting and past practices of home viewing beyond the theatrical realm. Sandokan’s Super8 circulation can be regarded as part of larger phenomenon of consumer culture, where reduction prints become a synecdoche to a larger cultural myth.
Copyright (c) 2024 Nicole Braida https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Making-of Documentary: An Approximation to some Discourse Intentions and Contemporary Uses
Based on the theoretical studies that have been published to date regarding the Making- of Documentary — concerning intertextuality, film studies, critical theory, mass communication theory and audiovisual didactics — we explore its specificities as a meta- cinematographic practice that manifests itself when a film accounts for the process of creating another film. The article is divided into three sections: Towards a Definition of the Making-of Documentary, Meta-cinematographic Formats and Functions and Specificities of the Making-of Documentary. In the first, its contemporary definition is proposed; In the following, we establish the distinction between the Making-of Documentary and its predecessors or other contemporary practices; Lastly, we approach its discursive intentions — as a promotional object of the film which it alludes to and of its filmmakers as “authors” — and its current uses, which promote an expansion of cinephilia and self- learning in the viewers.
Copyright (c) 2024 Armando Andrade Zamarripa https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Crimson Tide: Hans Zimmer, Subliminal Harmony, and Submerged Voices
Crimson Tide (Tony Scott, 1995) is a signal example of Hollywood action-adventure movies of the past forty years and in particular of the “high-concept” movie. The score by Hans Zimmer is a landmark score for the composer and consolidates his reputation for scoring films of that genre. This article addresses the now-famous Zimmerian work process and several stylistic traits, including the use of a male chorus. Choral voices in the film’s context provide both a synecdochic link to the submariners but also function as a commentative chorus. Using Neo-Riemannian theory, the potential contribution of which to film-music studies is still only now beginning to be explored, I examine the deployment of specific harmonic strategies that create a link back to earlier Hollywood film-music practices and show how Zimmer represents less an evolution than a continuation of recognisable styles and idioms.
Copyright (c) 2024 Donald Greig https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The New Digital Documentality of Contemporary Film Scoring Practices. Preliminary Results Based on Participant Observation at the Studio of North American Composer Christopher Young
The digital transition has radically transformed the atelier of the contemporary composer, leading to the emergence of a new “digital documentality”. This change necessitates a renewal of musicological research methodologies concerning contemporary creative practices. This paper presents the preliminary findings of an ethnographic fieldwork conducted at Christopher Young’s studio, highlighting the need to consider both documents and production practices. This approach has led to the development of an eclectic study methodology that integrates archival work with the investigation of oral histories, utilising a wide range of documentary sources and leading to a redefinition of the inquiry method. Despite the difficulty of replicating such a large-scale study, both synchronically and diachronically, we believe this research can provide meaningful methodological guidance for musicology concerned with source criticism in contemporary productions. Field observations focused on the music production of Christopher Young’s team for three films: The Autopsy (David Prior, 2022), The Offering (Oliver Park, 2023), and The Piper (Erlingur Thoroddsen, 2023). Fieldwork revealed how music teams integrate digital technologies into the compositional process with original technical, experimental, and creative solutions. The flexibility introduced by the digital transition represents one of the most significant challenges for contemporary musicological research on film music interested in reconstructing the compositional process.
Copyright (c) 2024 Andrea Bruno, Giulia Ferdeghini, Ilario Meandri https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Traditional Language with a Flair for Innovation: Hans Florian Zimmer’s Compositional Process
Hans Florian Zimmer is one of the best known and most prolific film composers in the world nowadays. His work defines the characteristics of present-day film music and is regarded as one of the most efficient practices in the field. Zimmer has expressed himself in different styles, making his language one of the greatest examples of musical eclecticism. His efficiency is equally evident in the field of production. Since his arrival in Hollywood in 1989, Zimmer has changed the entire production process that had been standardised since the 1930s. He has succeeded in bending an entire system to his own needs without any opportunism. He has optimised and rationalised musical productivity through the use of computer technology. Zimmer's work demonstrates a fundamental connection between production innovation and compositional eclecticism. Despite this, he frequently employs a traditional narrative method: thematism. However, his stylistic evolution and reinterpretation have distanced him considerably from concepts such as “theme” and “thematic development” of the classical tradition. Zimmer's traditionalism and keen sense for innovation merge to create a new result that also allows us to understand the latest evolution in the history of film music.
Copyright (c) 2024 Kristjan Stopar https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Cinematic Visions and Dreams of Edgard Varèse
More than is apparent in most of the existing studies, Edgard Varèse's experience with electronic composition, is closely linked to a profound reflection on the relationship between music and film, almost as if the two artistic expressions were to be considered closely linked, almost inseparable. Déserts (1954), albeit only in intention, La procession de Verges (1955) and Poème électronque (1959) pioneeringly investigate different ways of understanding music in relation to moving images: from the fictional work to the documentary film, and to the multimedia experience. Only recently, now immersed in the digital production world of DAWs, does the new medium – as often happens – allow us to shed new light on the “old” analogue world and enable us to fully understand the visionary force of Varesi's aesthetics and the poignancy of his way of understanding music and images. The paper retraces the compositional parabola that involved the author for the last years of his life, setting it down in the recording studios and human environments in which he found himself operating, in order to reconstruct, through the dense network of relationships between technology and thoughts, the milieu that gave rise to one of the multiple roots of film music.
Copyright (c) 2024 Luca Cossettini https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Signs of Innovation in European Cinema. Electronic Music in Antonioni and Tarkovsky
In the process of the emancipation of film music that took place in the first decades after World War II, the filmography of Michelangelo Antonioni and Andrei Tarkovsky offers multiple points of interest. Tarkovsky’s well-established relationship with Eduard Artemiev, matured within the Moscow studio, allowed Tarkovsky to use electronic sounds in some of his films, such as Solaris, in a manner far removed from the worn-out standards of science-fiction cinema. Likewise, Antonioni found in the music of Vittorio Gielmetti a suitable aural commentary on the mental disorders of the protagonist in Deserto rosso, inserting electronic music into the palette to describe the horizons of the inner human psyche. In both cases, the presence of noise is effectively combined with music to create a very complex sound texture.
Copyright (c) 2024 Roberto Calabretto https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Queering Italy: A Queer Vision of Today's Italy in the Streaming Platforms' Serial Landscape
Copyright (c) 2024 Greta Delpanno https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Comedic Compromise. Politics and Comedy in the History of Italian Television (1969-1982)
Copyright (c) 2024 Matteo Marinello https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Traveling Music Video, Edited by Tomáš Jirsa and Mathias Bonde Korsgaard, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023, pp. 288
Copyright (c) 2024 Annalisa Pellino https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Francesco Spampinato, Art vs. TV A Brief History of Contemporary Artists’ Responses to Television, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021, pp. 368
Copyright (c) 2024 Maria Teresa Soldani https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
GEMINI – Gender Equality through Media Investigations and New training Insights
Copyright (c) 2024 Marica Spalletta https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
New Musical Writing Processes for Cinema
Copyright (c) 2024 Roberto Calabretto, Luca Cossettini, Donald Greig https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
ABSTRACT PRIN 2017 - F-ACTOR. Forms of Contemporary Media Professional Acting. Training, Recruitment and Management, Social Discourses in Italy (2000-2020)
Copyright (c) 2024 Editorial Staff https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
ABSTRACT PRIN 2017 - A Private History of Italian Film Criticism: Public Roles and Private Relations. The Institutionalization of Film Criticism in Italy from the 1930s to the 1970s
ABSTRACT PRIN 2017 - Archives of the South. Non-Fiction Cinema and Southern Landscape in Italy 1948-1968
ABSTRACT PRIN 2017 - Transatlantic Transfers: The Italian Presence in Post-war America (1949-1972)
Francesco Casetti, Screening Fears: On Protective Media, New York: Zone Books 2023, pp. 272
Copyright (c) 2024 Francesco Zucconi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation around the World, London-New York: Verso 2023, pp. 272
Copyright (c) 2024 Samuel Antichi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Une goutte d’eau, une goutte d’étoiles. Microcinématographie et avant-garde dans les années 1920
A long-standing link exists between avant-garde and scientific cinema. In the 1920s, in fact, the former contributed to the construction of the latter: on the one hand, by its systematic inclusion in film clubs’ and film societies’ screening programs; on the other hand, by catalyzing the theoretical debate on the medium specificity because of the specific techniques it develops. Through the texts by philosophers, film makers and theorists of the time (Walter Benjamin, Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, Émile Vuillermoz, László Moholy-Nagy among others), this essay examines the role of microscope films in the construction of 1920s film theory, discussing several tropes and key concepts such as pure cinema, cinégraphie integrale, rhythm theory and optical “unconscious”.
Copyright (c) 2024 Maria Ida Bernabei https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Neoliberalism and the Mutations of Social Realism in Contemporary European Cinema
Over the last couple of decades film scholars have begun building a critical vocabulary to theorize the new kinds of social relations depicted in the new European cinema of precarity, from “flexible solidarity” and “precarious intimacies” to “the gift economy” and “cruel optimism”. Although the European cinema of precarity continues the legacy of older film traditions like French poetic realism, Italian neorealism and British kitchen sink realism, thus inscribing itself within a well-established European tradition of social realism, the realism of precarity films is often refracted through specific genre tropes or filmic devices—e.g., allegory, experimental cinema techniques, black comedy, cinema verité cinematography etc.—as though social realism is no longer able to render visual the hidden pathologies of neoliberalism or to capture the complexity of Europe’s current political, economic, and moral crisis.
Copyright (c) 2024 Temenuga Trifonova https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0