Archives

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  The Representation and Care of Illness. Visual Culture, Trauma, and Medical Humanities

  Vol. 22 No. 39 (2022)

  Edited by Silvia Casini, Alice Cati and Deborah Toschi

  For a long time, scholars in the Humanities have been trying to move towards a boundary space that touches upon the medical and scientific disciplines. More than others, the topic of representation/visualisation, the relationship between ways of seeing, images, and the techniques to create them has emerged as a fertile and valuable ground for dialogue. This special issue of Cinema & Cie sets itself the ambitious goal of opening an interdisciplinary discussion reflecting on the images of illness, wound, pain, scar, and cure, which are shared today more than ever and go beyond the narrow medical field. In order to develop a new interdisciplinary methodology suitable for capturing the emotions, material dimensions, bodily practices, performative dynamics, and intersubjective systems that, as a whole, consolidate the mise en discourse of the body as an object of care, we have called upon the traditions of Trauma Studies, Medical Humanities and Visual Culture of science and medicine. In this perspective, images are not only the starting point for understanding knowledge production processes but also a valuable restorative tool for care and therapeutic practices.

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  Gestalt Filmology. Insights on Form and Embodiment in the Film Experience

  Vol. 22 No. 38 (2022)

  Edited by Adriano D’Aloia and Ian Verstegen

  Recent advancements in the encounter between media studies and the cognitive sciences raises the possibility of re-launching some of the assumptions of Gestalt psychology as productive insights for film theory, analysis, and criticism. ‘Gestalt Filmology’ would be a body of knowledge taking hints from Rudolf Arnheim’s pioneering film theory but anchored in core Gestalt ideas about the multimodal functioning of the senses, motion and ego-perception and resulting filmic expressiveness and symbolism. Elaborated in this way, a Gestalt Filmology might be able to offer suggestions and correctives to an ‘embodied cognition’ and ‘neurofilmological’ approach in visual media studies. This special issue of Cinéma & Cie connects together elements of Arnheim’s thought from different periods of his career. It bolsters Arnheimian ideas with research strains from general gestalt-theoretical psychology, and it brings elements of those same Gestalt-theoretical traditions to parts of film theory that Arnheim never touched.

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  Glocal Detectives. Cultural Diversity In European Tv Crime Dramas

  Vol. 21 No. 36/37 (2021)

  Edited by Luca Barra, Alice Jacquelin and Federico Pagello

  TV screens across Europe are more and more filled with detectives, investigators, police(wo)men coming from abroad. After a long-lasting prominence of US figures, the last decades have offered an increasing visibility to characters coming from the UK, the Nordic regions of Scandinavia, the major continental markets as France, Germany, Spain and Italy, the Mediterranean regions, the Eastern and Central European countries, and so on. European crime narratives are complex objects: national, and global, and often glocal. Their popularity and circulation in European markets brings cultural diversity and puts audiences in touch with other not-so-far yet distinct cultures, while also – sometimes – laying ground for the development of a truly transnational, cross-European, shared popular culture. The special issue of Cinéma & Cie presents some results of the research carried out by Horizon 2020 project DETECt – Detecting Transcultural Identity in Contemporary Popular Crime Narratives, and includes a wide range of case histories, theoretical approaches, methodological frameworks. 

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  Mediatic Handology: Shaping Images, Interacting, Magicking

  Vol. 20 No. 35 (2020)

  Edited by Ada Ackerman, Barbara Grespi and Andrea Pinotti

  Digital culture, taken etymologically, means a culture of the fingers (from the Latin digitus). Although our contemporary times are still envisioned through the lens of an over-reigning visual paradigm, our media practice has become mainly bodily, since the role of hands has proven ever more decisive and gestures have increasingly been constructed as tools for thinking and conceptualization. This issue presents crucial case studies in film and visual culture, ranging from classic to experimental cinema, from science visualization to esoteric culture. In every field, filmed hands come to be extraordinary operators of visibility: they depict imaginary worlds which do not rely upon eye perception, they make visible the intimacy of the human being, they give shape to the spectator’s gaze and, in a more concrete fashion, to the image itself through gestures of care and restoration of the filmstrip as well as by anchoring vision through data visualization processes. A hypnotic and a powerful motif, hands represent the corporeal grounds of the cinematic medium and the indelible crystallization of the human in technique.

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  Experimental Women. Mapping Cinema and Video Practices From the Post-war Period Up to Present

  Vol. 20 No. 34 (2020)

  Edited by Sarah Keller, Elena Marcheschi and Giulia Simi

  Experimental cinema, as well as experimental video practices, have always been art forms widely explored by women. Yet, while the field of cinema studies has devoted research — although only recently — to women involved in narrative and commercial films, as directors, actresses, screenwriters and in other roles of cinema industry, the history of women’s experimental audio-visual production is still little explored and would benefit from being retraced and framed in a wider historical and theoretical perspective. This special issue of Cinéma&Cie is therefore aimed at tracing women’s experimental practices at the intersection of cinema and the arts by intertwining a theoretical and historical approach through the analysis of cases studies from the mid-century up to the present time.

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  Archaeologies of the Virtual. Materialities, Senses, Imaginaries

  Vol. 23 No. 40 (2023)

  Edited by Anna Caterina Dalmasso, Wanda Strauven, and Simone Venturini

  Even though it is often presented as an unprecedented technology, virtual reality is a new medium as much as it is an old one, and an imaginary one. Virtual technologies have been long foreshadowed by intermedia fictional worlds, anticipated by the virtualisation of visuality that took shape during Modernity, and even prefigured by the multifarious attempts to realise the immersion of the spectator, which can be traced back to the most ancient forms of human art and image-making techniques. In order to understand this changing mediascape, the role of a media-archaeological approach to the virtual lies not only in restoring lines of continuity with the past, but in providing different frameworks to critically interrogate the process of virtualisation of the environment, which exceeds the state of present-day media technologies. In this perspective, the issue aims to investigate the material and corporeal conditions, catalysing multisensory spectatorship and the concretisation of immersive media, as much as the epistemic and imaginary constructs which support and underpin them.