L’obiettivo di questo lavoro è la ricostruzione di un oggetto mediale di cui ormai in Rete si sono perse le tracce: il webcinema, il cinema creato, realizzato e distribuito attraverso la Rete. Esso nasce e si sviluppa in una fase pionieristica del web tra la seconda metà degli anni novanta e i primi anni del XXI secolo, in un periodo segnato dalla sviluppo della tecnologia dello streaming che consentirà la trasmissione di contenuti sonori e audiovisivi attraverso la Rete, ridefinendo il concetto del web stesso da collezione di testi a flusso di informazioni audiovisive, l’euforia della net economy e lo scoppio della bolla delle dot-com. Per analizzare questo fenomeno ibrido, di cui la teorizzazione coeva è scarsa e di cui la Rete sembra essersi dimenticata, adottiamo l’approccio metodologico della Actor-network Theory che ci permetterà di investigare i veloci cambiamenti, l’instabilità e l’eterogeneità propria dei media digitali. Con l’analisi del case history verrà evidenziata la complessa relazione esistente tra dimensione tecnologica e dimensione sociale che nel caso dei media digitali è improntata a momenti di apertura nei confronti della innovazione e di stabilizzazione e definizione di determinati modelli d’uso. / Aim of this work is the reconstruction of a forgotten media by the Net: webcinema, cinema created specifically for viewing on the Internet. It is born and it develops in a pioneering phase of the web between the second half of the Nineties and first years of XXI century, in a period marked from the development of the streaming technology allowing the transmission of sound and audiovisual contents through the Net, redefining quite the concept of the web from collection of texts to audiovisual informational flux, net economy hype and the collapse of the dot-com bubble. In order to analyze this hybrid media object, barely studied by the contemporaneous scholarship and forgotten by the Net, we use the Actor-network theory approach that will allow to investigate the rapid changes, the instability and the heterogeneity of digital media. The case history will underline the complex relation between technological dimension and social dimension that digital media modellize in an opening approach versus innovation and a stabilization one versus some certain user models.

This dissertation examines the development of Chinese art film in the 1990s. It explores the mechanisms that were conducive to the emergence of this art wave and its representative cinematic styles. Art film was a historically underdeveloped film practice in China, especially under the mass line-dominated Socialist film system. I argue that Chinese art cinema was fundamentally defined by the second art wave, which was flanked by the first art wave (the Fifth Generation Cinema) of the 1980s, and the full capitalization of the film industry in the new millennium. The key to understanding the second art wave was the paradoxical industrial process of the Socialist film system reform of the 1990s. The controlled top-down reform made the emergence of independent production possible while at the same time denying its legitimacy. As the result, the Chinese art film production breathed new life but was pushed from the mainstream to the realm of the alternative. In alliance with other youth subculture phenomena of the time, such as rock music and avant-garde art, art film came to be defined as a distinctive position in the field of Chinese film production in terms of the mode of production (mostly independent), distribution (international film festivals), and film style. Three styles are examined in detail in this dissertation: the documentary-inspired new realist style represented by films of Jia Zhangke, the modernistic expressionist style represented by films of He Jianjun, Zhang Ming, and others, and the style that falls in-between the new realist and expressionist style represented by early films of Zhang Yuan, Lou Ye, and Wang Xiaoshuai. / text

This dissertation examines the as yet untethered practice of the convergence of film and architecture in public municipal spaces against the backdrop of the idea of the relocation of the moving picture. Since this is an interdisciplinary practice whose forms and operations are influenced by a host of dynamics, the initial film perspective is supplemented by related themes from the spheres of architecture, public municipal space, and the organisation of culture and the applied arts, including advertising. The wide range of subjects covered in this dissertation is given focus by narrowly localised research examining the situation in Prague from the 1990s until 2010. Along with the case study, the chapters devoted to the discursive field form a progress report on the situation as regards this particular media practice, the outputs of which are subject to a short half-life that considerably limits the possibility of archiving them. The structure of the case study is derived from a specific classificatory framework and is close to the "catalogue" format, determined by a series of questions - who participated on the convergence of film and architecture and where, when and how. Though a specific segment of time was monitored, it did not remain free of links to previous working methods, historical situations and...