Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-05, Section: A, page: 1577. Adviser: Jonathan Fineberg. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 287-310) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

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Studio storiografico condotto su fonti archivistiche, filmiche e sulla stampa locale e specializzata che ricostruisce dettagliatamente l'ambiente cittadino d'inizio Novecento nel quale si sono diffusi i primi spettacoli cinematografici, determinandone le caratteristiche e tracciandone l'evoluzione fra 1896 e 1925. L'avvento della cinematografia è strettamente connesso a un processo di modernizzazione del volto urbano, degli stili di vita, delle idee e il cinema si salda a queste istanze di rinnovamento, con una precisa ricaduta sull'immagine della città e sull'esperienza dei suoi cittadini appartenenti alle diverse classi sociali. / The focus of this work is to reconstruct in detail the urban environment, its characteristics and evolution, in the beginning of the Twentieth Century, when the first movies were shown, using primary and filmic sources, and local and specialised press. Early cinema history is closely related to a process of modernization of the city of Bologna, as well as lifestyles and ideas, and the movies are tightly related to these instances, with a precise influence over the image of the city and on the experience of the citizens belonging to different social classes.

Ce travail vise à questionner les outils méthodologiques et les fondations théoriques de l’activité de restauration afin de les appliquer sur un corpus d’œuvres souvent laissé aux marges des discours de ce champ disciplinaire : le film d’artiste et le film expérimental. On se focalisera sur les années 1960-1980 pour traiter, entre autres, du travail de Bruce Conner, Carolee Schneemann, Anthony McCall, Paul Sharits. Conçu et organisé comme un dialogue possible entre les exigences de systématisation théorique et les spécificités des œuvres, ce travail défend une méthodologie ouverte et dynamique, à l’instar des objets considérés. Dans le parcours esquissé, qui s’appuie sur des recherches en archives, on traitera de questions de reconstruction textuelle (à partir de la philologie d’auteur), de la performance et de l’installation, ou encore de l’intervention sur la matière des œuvres (en problématisant les positions du théoricien de la restauration Cesare Brandi) et de l’obsolescence technologique. En mobilisant des concepts issus de champs différents mais qu’on aimerait considérer ici comme complémentaires (histoire de l’art, esthétique, histoire technique du film), cette recherche dévoile l’activité herméneutique sous-jacente à toute entreprise de restauration. C’est à partir des cette hypothèse des liens entre théorie et pratique que l’on envisagera les enjeux spécifiques qui accompagnent la transmission des objets filmiques. / This dissertation aims to question the methodological tools and theoretical foundations of the practice of restoration in order to apply them to a body of work often left at the margins of this disciplinary field: experimental and artists’ film. Focusing on the years 1960-1980, it will examine works by Bruce Conner, Carolee Schneemann, Anthony McCall, and Paul Sharits, among others. Conceived and organized as a possible dialogue between theoretical assessment and the practical necessities of specific works, this research defends an open and dynamic methodology of restoration much like the objects herein considered. Through archival research, this dissertation will confront issues of textual reconstruction (starting from literary philology), performance and installation, scholarly debates concerning the materiality of artworks (problematizing the positions of restoration theorist Cesare Brandi), and the question of technological obsolescence. Mobilizing concepts from different fields considered as complementary (art history, aesthetics, the technological history of film), this dissertation seeks to describe the hermeneutical activity underlying any restoration process. It is starting from this hypothesis, which links theory and practice, that it will consider the specific issues accompanying the life of filmic objects. / Il lavoro si propone di mettere in discussione gli strumenti metodologici e le basi teoriche dell’attività di restauro, al fine di volgersi a un corpus spesso considerato come marginale nella letteratura scientifica inerente alla disciplina: il film d’artista e sperimentale. Ci si concentrerà in particolare sugli anni 1960-1980 per analizzare, tra gli altri, la produzione di Bruce Conner, Carolee Schneemann, Anthony McCall, Paul Sharits. La tesi, concepita e costruita come un possibile dialogo tra l’esigenza di sistematizzazione teorica e le caratteristiche specifiche delle opere, promuove una metodologia aperta e dinamica, adattandosi dunque agli oggetti considerati. In un percorso che si vuole teorico, ma ugualmente frutto di ricerche in archivio, si tratteranno problemi di ricostruzione testuale (basandosi sulla filologia d’autore), questioni riguardanti la performance e l’installazione, interventi sulla materia delle opere (sulla scorta di una rilettura critica della Teoria del restauro di Cesare Brandi), o ancora il problema dell’obsolescenza tecnologica. La ricerca tende a includere e adattare concetti provenienti da diverse discipline (storia dell’arte, estetica, storia tecnologica del film, qui considerate come complementari), per poter infine descrivere l’attività di restauro come operazione ermeneutica. Muovendo da un’ipotesi di lavoro che unisce teoria e pratica, la ricerca affronta i problemi specifici relativi alla “trasmissione al futuro” delle opere filmiche.

La pratica del remix è al giorno d’oggi sempre più diffusa e un numero sempre più vasto di persone ha ora le competenze e gli strumenti tecnologici adeguati per eseguire operazioni un tempo riservate a nicchie ristrette. Tuttavia, nella sua forma audiovisiva, il remix ha ottenuto scarsa attenzione a livello accademico. Questo lavoro esplora la pratica del remix intesa al contempo come declinazione contemporanea di una pratica di lungo corso all’interno della storia della produzione audiovisiva – ovvero il riuso di immagini – sia come forma caratteristica della contemporaneità mediale, atto di appropriazione grassroots dei contenuti mainstream da parte degli utenti. La tesi si articola in due sezioni. Nella prima, l’analisi di tipo teorico e storico-critico è suddivisa in due macro-aree di intervento: da una parte il remix inteso come pratica, atto di appropriazione, gesto di riciclo, decontestualizzazione e risemantizzazione delle immagini mediali che ha attraversato la storia dei media audiovisivi [primo capitolo]. Dall’altra, la remix culture, ovvero il contesto culturale e sociale che informa l’ambiente mediale entro il quale la pratica del remix ha conosciuto, nell’ultimo decennio, la diffusione capillare che lo caratterizza oggi [secondo capitolo]. La seconda, che corrisponde al terzo capitolo, fornisce una dettagliata panoramica su un caso di studio, la pratica del fan vidding. Forma di remix praticata quasi esclusivamente da donne, il vidding consiste nel creare fan video a partire da un montaggio d’immagini tratte da film o serie televisive che utilizza come accompagnamento musicale una canzone. Le vidders, usando specifiche tecniche di montaggio, realizzano delle letture critiche dei prodotti mediali di cui si appropriano, per commentare, criticare o celebrare gli oggetti di loro interesse. Attraverso il vidding il presente lavoro indaga le tattiche di rielaborazione e riscrittura dell’immaginario mediale attraverso il riuso di immagini, con particolare attenzione al remix inteso come pratica di genere. / The practice of remix is everyday more spread in the contemporary audiovisual production, and performed by an ever-growing number of people, who now have technological instruments and technical skills to perform something that was once reserved only to experimental artists. Despite its growing presence in the media sphere, remix, especially in audiovisual form, has received little analytical attention. This work explores the practice of remix as both the contemporary declination of a long term practice in audiovisual media – that is the re-use of found footage – and the grassroots act of appropriation of mainstream media contents by users. The dissertation is divided into two parts. In the first part, a theoretical and historical-critical in-depth analysis is further divided into two chapters. The first is dedicated to the practice of remix as an act of appropriation, of recycle, of decontextualisation and resemantization of media images through the history of audiovisual media. The second investigates remix as the cultural, social and media context in which remix has seen in the last decade a capillary diffusion. The second part, which corresponds to the third chapter, is dedicated to a single case study, the practice of fan vidding. An - almost exclusively - female audiovisual form of fandom activity that consists in appropriating clips from movies or TV shows, re-editing them and setting them to music, usually to pop songs. Vidders, using editing strategies and techniques, stage analytical readings of the original media texts they appropriate, in order to comment upon the sources, criticize them, or praise them. Through vidding, this work explores the tactics of reworking and rewriting of media imaginary through remix, and focuses especially on remix as a gendered practice.

Tra le plurime conseguenze dell’avvento del digitale, la riarticolazione dei rapporti tra immagine statica e immagine in movimento è certamente una delle più profonde. Sintomatica dei cambiamenti in atto sia nei film studies sia nella storia dell’arte, tale riarticolazione richiede un ripensamento dei confini disciplinari tradizionali entro cui il cinema e la fotografia sono stati affrontati come oggetti di studio separati e distinti. Nell’adottare un approccio molteplice, volto a comprendere prospettive provenienti dalla New Film History e dalla media archaeology, dalla teoria dell’arte e dagli studi visuali, questo lavoro esplora l’esistenza di una relazione dialettica tra il cinema e la fotografia intesa in modo duplice: come tensione costitutiva tra due media indissolubilmente connessi – non tanto in considerazione di un medesimo principio realistico di rappresentazione quanto, piuttosto, in virtù di uno scambio incessante nella modellizzazione di categorie quali il tempo, il movimento, l’immobilità, l’istante, la durata; come istanza peculiare della pratica artistica contemporanea, paradigma di riferimento nella produzione estetica di immagini. La tesi si suddivide in tre capitoli. Il primo si concentra sul rapporto tra l’immobilità e il movimento dell’immagine come cifra in grado di connettere l’estetica delle attrazioni e la cronofotografia a una serie di esperienze filmiche e artistiche prodotte nei territori delle avanguardie. Il secondo capitolo considera l’emergenza, dagli anni Novanta, di pratiche artistiche in cui l’incontro intermediale tra film e fotografia fornisce modelli di analisi volti all’indagine dell’attuale condizione estetica e tecnologica. Il terzo offre una panoramica critica su un caso di studio, la GIF art. La GIF è un formato digitale obsoleto che consente di produrre immagini che appaiono, simultaneamente, come fisse e animate; nel presente lavoro, la GIF è discussa come un medium capace di contraddire i confini attraverso cui concepiamo l’immagine fissa e in movimento, suggerendo, inoltre, un possibile modello di pensiero storico-cronologico anti-lineare. / Among the numerous consequences of the advent of the digital age, the redefinition of the boundaries between still and moving images is certainly one of the deepest. Closely connected to the changes that are now occurring in film studies and art history, this redefinition requires a rethinking of the traditional borders between cinema and photography. Adopting perspectives belonging to New Film History, media archaeology, art theory and visual studies, the present work aims at exploring the existence of a dialectical relationship between cinema and photography. This dialectic is understood in a double sense: on the one hand, as a constitutive tension between two media that are inextricably linked in shaping time, movement, immobility, instant and duration, and, on the other hand as a new paradigm in contemporary art. The dissertation is subdivided into three chapters. In the first one the dialectical relationship between movement and stillness is the key to understanding some connections between early cinema's aesthetic of attraction, chronophotography and avant-garde. The second chapter considers the emergence, since the 1990s, of artistic practices that aim at employing cinema and photography in order to reflect current aesthetic and technological conditions. The third chapter offers a critical overview of the case study of GIF art. GIF is an obsolete digital format that allows images to be produced that seem to be simultaneously still and moving; in the present work, GIF is discussed as a medium able to contradict the boundaries between still and moving images, suggesting furthermore a possible conceptual model for thinking about time and history in a discontinuous way.

L’obiettivo primario di questo lavoro è quello di esplorare un insieme di documentari corti italiani di tipo etnografico e sociologico. Questi film hanno ricevuto pochissima attenzione critica, mentre sono essenziali alla comprensione del periodo di storia italiana compreso fra gli ultimi anni del Regime fascista e la fine del “Miracolo economico”. La prima parte della tesi è dedicata alla descrizione del contesto economico, sociologico, politico in cui questi lavori sono stati prodotti. La seconda parte si concentra su circa un centinaio di documentari corti analizzati sulla base di tre diversi criteri. Innanzitutto li abbiamo considerati a partire da un punto di vista autoriale, secondariamente a partire dalle loro caratteristiche produttive e distributive e infine sulla base di un criterio regionale. A partire dalla discussione antropologica coeva riguardante la scomparsa dei mondi contadini e su una precisa ricerca d’archivio focalizzata sullo stesso tema, abbiamo poi comparato il risultato dell’analisi del corpus con altre forme filmiche di rappresentazione dello stesso soggetto. Oltre a far riemergere un gruppo di autori e film quasi dimenticati, questo lavoro intende lanciare uno sguardo sul veloce, conflittuale e sbilanciato cambiamento compreso fra i mondi rurali tradizionali e la modernità, che ha caratterizzato la società italiana degli anni Cinquanta e Sessanta. / The primary goal of this work is to explore a group of italian ethnographic and sociological short documentary films. While they received no critical or little recognition, these films are indeed essential to the understanding of Italian history that goes from the last years of the Fascist Regime to the end of the so called Italian “economic miracle”. The first part of this dissertation is dedicated to describe the economical, sociological and political context within which these works have been produced. The second part focuses on the analysis of nearly one hundred short documentaries, based on a three-fold methodology. Firstly, I consider these works from an authorial point of view. Secondly, I focus on production and distribution issues, and finally I examine the corpus using a regional criteria. Building on the coeval anthropological discussion regarding the disappearance of the rural worlds and on a focused and in-depth archival research, I compare the corpus' analysis results with other forms of filmic representations about the same subject. In addition to casting a light on a nearly forgotten group of authors and films, this work provides a valuable insights on the fast, conflicting and unbalanced transition between the traditional rural world and the modernity characterizing the Italian society between the Fifties and the Sixties.

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The thesis reconstructs the cinema’s experience of Italian missionaries during the XX century in a historical-pragmatic key. Italian missionaries, who started producing movies around the Twenties, have used cinema as a helpful instrument for religious propaganda. They have considered the rules of the Catholic Church, the political and social context and the audience’s expectations. Each chapter (1-4) analyses the phenomenon inside the context constituted by the Italian colonial experiences, the relationship between Catholic Church and images during the Evangelization, the history of cinema and the history of missions. A specific chapter (chapter 5) is dedicated to the archives of missionary’s cinema and to the value to be assigned to this film production (in terms of social memory and archive’s memory). At the end of the first part, the thesis presents a proposal about the relationship between missionary’s cinema and visual anthropology. The second part of the thesis includes the film cards of the missionary’s movies preserved in Italy: 339 cards of Italian movies and 149 cards of foreign movies placed in different archives and bureaus.

This research argues for an analysis of textual and cultural forms in the American horror film (1968- 1998), by defining the so-called postmodern characters. The “postmodern” term will not mean a period of the history of cinema, but a series of forms and strategies recognizable in many American films. From a bipolar re-mediation and cognitive point of view, the postmodern phenomenon is been considered as a formal and epistemological re-configuration of the cultural “modern” system. The first section of the work examines theoretical problems about the “postmodern phenomenon” by defining its cultural and formal constants in different areas (epistemology, economy, mass-media): the character of convergence, fragmentation, manipulation and immersion represent the first ones, while the “excess” is the morphology of the change, by realizing the “fluctuation” of the previous consolidated system. The second section classifies the textual and cultural forms of American postmodern film, generally non-horror. The “classic narrative” structure – coherent and consequent chain of causal cues toward a conclusion – is scattered by the postmodern constant of “fragmentation”. New textual models arise, fragmenting the narrative ones into the aggregations of data without causal-temporal logics. Considering the process of “transcoding”1 and “remediation”2 between media, and the principle of “convergence” in the phenomenon, the essay aims to define these structures in postmodern film as “database forms” and “navigable space forms.” The third section applies this classification to American horror film (1968-1998). The formal constant of “excess” in the horror genre works on the paradigm of “vision”: if postmodern film shows a crisis of the “truth” in the vision, in horror movies the excess of vision becomes “hyper-vision” – that is “multiplication” of the death/blood/torture visions – and “intra-vision”, that shows the impossibility of recognizing the “real” vision from the virtual/imaginary. In this perspective, the textual and cultural forms and strategies of postmodern horror film are predominantly: the “database-accumulation” forms, where the events result from a very simple “remote cause” serving as a pretext (like in Night of the Living Dead); the “database-catalogue” forms, where the events follow one another displaying a “central” character or theme. In the first case, the catalogue syntagms are connected by “consecutive” elements, building stories linked by the actions of a single character (usually the killer), or connected by non-consecutive episodes about a general theme: examples of the first kind are built on the model of The Wizard of Gore; the second ones, on the films such as Mario Bava’s I tre volti della paura. The “navigable space” forms are defined: hyperlink a, where one universe is fluctuating between reality and dream, as in Rosemary’s Baby; hyperlink b (where two non-hierarchical universes are convergent, the first one real and the other one fictional, as in the Nightmare series); hyperlink c (where more worlds are separated but contiguous in the last sequence, as in Targets); the last form, navigable-loop, includes a textual line which suddenly stops and starts again, reflecting the pattern of a “loop” (as in Lost Highway). This essay analyses in detail the organization of “visual space” into the postmodern horror film by tracing representative patterns. It concludes by examining the “convergence”3 of technologies and cognitive structures of cinema and new media.