Extended syllabus
Mise en scène, metalanguage, intertextuality are founding issues of the theorethical debate on cinema and audiovisual media. This course is designed to investigate them through the analysis of exemplary works of the cinema history, thanks to the formal qualities of these films that make visible and question their meaning production. On the other hand, exploring and exposing the formal qualities of a filmwork means scrutinizing its style, its costruction modes and procedures, as well as its discoursive strategies. In this context, the notion of a modern style can be useful to identify the common features of the course selected filmography. In fact, this style runs through the entire Seventh Art history, and has nothing to do neither with the technological matrix of cinema (i.e. cinema as a modern art in its own, out of its technological nature), nor with the social mirroring (i.e. cinema as a content reflection of an age and its society). The study of this notion, together with its theoretical foundations and distinguishing traits, will be the reference conceptual axis for the analysis of the course selected films, pointing out the conjuncture of self-reflexivity and material-reproduction. We will also see that this conjuncture problematizes the complex relationship between cinema and “reality”, and shows in an original and innovative way the «impurity» of cinema, meaning the productive comparison between cinema and other artistic languages.
Lectures will investigate the course selected audiovisual materials (feature, documentary and essay films, videoworks) in the frame of their cultural-historical context of realization; a considerable attention will be payed to the comparison between cinema and other arts (literature, painting, dance, theatre, music), expounding the interrelationship between the the film medium self-reflexivity and the highlight of its reproduction quality, with this interrelationship at the base of the peculiar intersemiotic operations perfomed by the films shown in class. This course aims to develop an informed understanding of the cinematic practices under examination; the theoretical elaboration of international prominent authors and scholars will provide the methodological tools useful for analysis and discussions in class. During the course additional materials to allow for more in-depth studies may be referenced.