*CFP* "FILM EXHIBITION: THE ITALIAN CONTEXT", SYMPOSIUM AND EDITED VOLUME

This symposium and edited volume seeks to draw together research into cinematic exhibition in Italy throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century. Current research into Italian cinema is continuously expanding its purview to consider the great range of genres, forms and contexts that have been engaged by filmmakers working in the country. Similarly, recent studies have shone vital light on the complex make up of Italy’s film audiences, and on the practices of film producers and distributors in the country. This project will continue this critical expansion by investigating the myriad ways in which film media (both Italian and foreign) has been exhibited and consumed in Italy. It aims to investigate both the audience experience of film exhibition and the practices of exhibitors themselves (eg their programming habits, the construction and restoration of cinemas, their relationships with distributors and political organisations etc).

Possible subjects of discussion could include, but are not limited to:

• The screening of silent/early films at travelling fairs and other public events 
• The establishment/construction of Italy’s first purpose-built cinemas 
• The conversion of Italian cinemas to sound 

*CFP* "PORNOGRAPHY AS A CULTURE: A LOCAL PERSPECTIVE", SPECIAL ISSUE, GENDER/SEXUALITY/ITALY JOURNAL

This themed section seeks to examine pornography as a nexus of practices, knowledges, institutions, and economies primarily concerned with bodily pleasure. It considers pornography as a rich cultural field: a terrain on which is staged an ongoing struggle over the politics of representation, the social legitimacy, and the cultural visibility of desires, bodies and intimacies. Pornography has long been the object of censorship, surveillance and intense political critique. Once primarily associated with exploitative sexual practices and oppressive ideas about gender roles, it has now become a central sphere of intervention for queer and feminist activists, and for radical political work. Within pornography, consumption practices often intersect with participatory spheres of culture production and community-making dynamics. This intersection tests the thin line between social practice, representation and fantasy within which porn operates as a cultural and media domain.

In Italy, pornography first emerged as a noteworthy cultural phenomenon in the mid-1970s, with the proliferation of adult magazines and the first hard-core films by directors like Joe D’Amato. In the 1980s, Italian media (print, cinema, and intermittently even television) were flooded with sexually explicit images, the production and circulation of pornographic materials paralleling and sometimes exceeding the exploits of North-European countries such as France or Germany. During this time, a significant process of deregulation and legitimization of sexually explicit materials transformed what had largely been seen as a predominantly Catholic country prone to censorship into a libertarian paradise for pornographers and their publics. 

*CFP* "MEDIATING ITALY IN GLOBAL CULTURE", IV EDITION SUMMER SCHOOL

“Mediating Italy in Global Culture” Summer School, IV edition

June 28th-July 2nd 2021

Blended format (DAMSLab Bologna, Italy and live streamed)

 

The Department of the Arts of the University of Bologna, in collaboration with Brown University, Dickinson College, The University of Michigan, The Ohio State University, and Wesleyan University, invites applications for the 2021 “Mediating Italy in Global Culture” summer school, which will be held from Monday, June 28th to Friday, July 2nd, 2021. Given the ongoing uncertainty of the current situation, the intention for this year is to hold the course, if it will be possible, in a hybrid format, allowing students to attend either in person in Bologna or online. Otherwise, the summer school will be fully online. Updates will be given in due course to selected participants.

*CFP* "PAST AND PRESENT INTERSECTIONS AMONG ITALIAN, RUSSIAN, SOVIET AND POST-SOCIALIST CINEMAS AND MEDIA", THEMED ISSUE, JOURNAL OF ITALIAN CINEMA AND MEDIA STUDIES

Italian cinema and media are translational and transnational. They are imported and exported, transferred, translated, adopted, adapted and re-interpreted. They move in multiple directions and constantly intersect with other filmmaking and media cultures, in particular with cinemaand media traditions from Central and Eastern Europe, Russia and the former Soviet Union. The seminal work published in the bilingual (Italian and Russian) volume Russia-Italia. Un secolo di cinema (ABCDesign 2020), edited by Olga Strada and Claudia Olivieri, sponsored by the Italian Embassy in Moscow, and presented both at the 77th edition of the Venice Film Festival and at the 42nd edition of the International Film Festival in Moscow in fall 2020, is the first and largest collection of essays, interviews, testimonials, photographs and unpublished documents, exploring the artistic, cultural and historical relationship between Russia and Italy starting from early cinema.

Within such an intersectional framework, scholars are invited to engage in new methodologically critical approaches to Italian cinema and media in order to recover overlooked connections and re-compose them in historic and aesthetic maps, and also to examine commercial and distribution relations marked by cross-national dialogues and trans-generational exchanges.

*CFP* "GIALLO! THE LONG HISTORY OF ITALIAN TELEVISION CRIME DRAMA", SPECIAL ISSUE, JOURNAL OF ITALIAN CINEMA AND MEDIA STUDIES

Most of the Italian television drama able to circulate internationally belongs to the multifaceted crime genre, both in some sparse examples from the past and in growing contemporary productions (from premium channels and digital platforms to public service and commercial broadcasters). However, for many decades, only a limited range of titles has been given scholarly attention, drawing a useful yet partial account of an otherwise dense and multi-layered history. Moreover, exceptions have often been studied far more than the most conventional crime series in the ‘giallo’ spectrum: most police procedurals are deemed too formulaic, or too popular, to be distinguished. Therefore, this special issue intends to overcome these limits by focusing on the historical evolution of the crime genre inside the development of Italian television, from the early stages to the latest mainstream and niche successes, and by highlighting the many crime titles that have become familiar to large Italian audiences.

Through the Italian crime drama and its evolution over the decades, an original history of Italian television and media can be easily outlined, where ‘giallo’ would often mark changes of pace, innovations, successes and failures. Already in the first twenty years of the so-called paleo-television and monopoly period, crime drama was facilitating the Italian ‘sceneggiato’’s turn towards a medium-long seriality: the investigations of ‘tenente’ Sheridan (from 1959 to 1972, first with Giallo club. Invito al poliziesco and later with Ritorna il tenente Sheridan, Sheridan squadra omicidi and Le donne del tenente Sheridan) or Le inchieste del commissario Maigret (1964-1972), starring Gino Cervi; or Nero Wolfe (1969-1971). 

*CFP* CALL FOR ARTICLES, ISSUE 39, LA VALLE DELL'EDEN / EAST OF EDEN: JOURNAL OF CINEMA, PHOTOGRAPHY, MEDIA

For a long time, screenwriting has been largely ignored by film scholars, in Italy as well as in other countries. Film Studies have been – and partially still are – dominated by an auteur-centered approach, where the only relevant figure of the cast & credits is the director. But in the seventies, thanks to seminal books such as Pauline Kael’s The Citizen Kane Book (1974) – recently “rediscovered” because of David Fincher’s Mank (2020) – and Richard Corliss’ Talking Pictures: Screenwriters in the American Cinema (1974), things started to change. In Italy, the widespread influence of the politiques des auteurs had joined forces with the Rossellinian-Fellinian distrust – not to say contempt – toward the screenplay and the professional figure of the screenwriter. It is not a chance that, in Italy, when research in this area finally started, it avoided directly addressing the Italian screenwriters. The first important Italian scholarly books and essays were devoted to screenwriting in general (Giuliana Muscio’s anthology Scrivere il film, 1981), or to classical Hollywood screenwriters (Guido Fink’s essay on Samson Raphaelson, 1994). In the last twenty years, a new generation of film scholars has produced a series of stimulating, well researched books and essays on Italian screenwriting and screenwriters, from the silent years to the present (among others, see: Federica Villa, 2002 and 2010; Silvio Alovisio, 2005; Maria Pia Comand, 2006; David Bruni, 2011). Today, Italy has a significant production of studies on screenwriting in the Italian cinema. But of course there are still many unaddressed questions. For example, there is no systematic study, based on archival research, devoted to the scripts of the “commedia all’italiana”, a genre where writing plays a very relevant role. There are no studies on the big Italian directors conducted through the perspective of their collaboration with a screenwriter (i.e. Luchino Visconti and Suso Cecchi D’Amico).

*CFP* CALL FOR ARTICLES, 2021 ISSUE, L'AVVENTURA: INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ITALIAN FILM AND MEDIA LANDSCAPES

L’avventura. International Journal of Italian Film and Media Landscapes aims at positioning itself at the heart of the contemporary debate on Italian visual and media culture, its history and its present characteristics. The journal’s main areas of interest include:

• Patterns, styles, figures: the evolution of styles and patterns, themes and narratives; the relationship between film and other art and communication practices; modes of production and industrial forms.
• Archive: film and media archives, as much as oral sources.
• Differences: local, national, gender and generational identities as shaped and molded in cinema and media discourse.
• Spectatorship: reception and audience studies within the Italian context or related to the Italian media products circulating abroad.
• Camera: the history and present of Italian photography, as related to visual and media culture.
• Contemporary tale: a fresh look onto contemporary narrative patterns within Italian media production.

*CFP* CALL FOR ARTICLES, ISSUE 2 2020, L'AVVENTURA, INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ITALIAN FILM AND MEDIA LANDSCAPES,*CFP* ISSUE 2-2020, L'AVVENTURA: INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ITALIAN FILM AND MEDIA LANDSCAPES

L’avventura. International Journal of Italian Film and Media Landscapes aims at positioning itself at the heart of the contemporary debate on Italian visual and media culture, its history and its present characteristics. The journal is rated Class A by the Italian national agency for the evaluation of the university and research system (ANVUR).

The journal’s main areas of interest include:

• Patterns, styles, figures: the evolution of styles and patterns, themes and narratives; the rela­tionship between film and other art and communication practices; modes of production and industrial forms.
• Archive: film and media archives, as much as oral sources.
• Differences: local, national, gender and generational identities as shaped and moulded in cinema and media discourse.
• Spectatorship: reception and audience studies within the Italian context, or related to the Ital­ian media products circulating abroad.
• Camera:  the history and present of Italian photography, as related to visual and media culture.
• Contemporary tale: a fresh look onto contemporary narrative patterns within Italian me­dia production.

*CFP* “FELLINI, THE BOOK OF DREAMS BETWEEN ART AND CINEMA”, FELLINI 100 INTERNACIONAL 2020 CONFERENCE

Fellini 100 International Conference

Fellini, the "Book of Dreams" between Art and Cinema

1-2 de abril de 2020

Bolonia, Itania

With the publication of the new edition of Federico Fellini's Book of Dreams (edited by Mondadori  Electa), a two-day conference is organized on the occasion of the centenary of the Maestro's birth (1920/2020). The volume itself and its innumerable suggestions act as the subject of possible papers.

The Book, in fact, will not only be analyzed and discussed within specific interventions, but will provide ideas for the definition of Fellini's poetics, or for the examination of figures, themes, icons, references, places of Fellini's cinema.

Oneirism, unconscious, psychoanalysis, graphics, sexuality, popular culture, diary, caricature, deformed mirror, self-portrait, and more: so many are the definitions of Federico Fellini's Book of Dreams. The purpose of the conference is to understand whether - thanks to the anniversary and the imminence of the opening of the new Federico Fellini International Museum - the book of Fellini's cinema can be metaphorically and literally "re-opened", with the confirmation of some streams of research and the opening of new perspectives.

*CFP* "DIETRO LE QUINTE: TONINO GUERRA AND POSTWAR ITALIAN CINEMA AND CULTURE", SPECIA ISSUE, JOURNAL OF ITALIAN CINEMA AND MEDIA STUDIES

The year 2020 will be the centenary of the birth of Tonino Guerra (1920-2012). Guerra was a major figure in Italian cinema and beyond. He was a screenwriter for (among others) Vittorio De Sica, Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Elio Petri, Francesco Rosi, Marco Bellocchio, the Taviani brothers, Giuseppe Tornatore, Andrei Tarkovsky and Theo Angelopoulos. He was nominated for an Academy Award for the screenplay of Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni 1966) and is well known for scripting (with Fellini) Amarcord (1973). Despite his centrality to a moment in which Italian cinema was internationally dominant, Guerra has received very little critical attention. As well as a screenwriter, he was a noted poet, fiction writer, and visual artist. We are soliciting articles for a special issue, to be published at the end of 2020, on the importance of Guerra in Italian postwar and auteur cinema and culture.

Since JICMS is a cinema and media journal, the issue will focus largely on Guerra’s cinematic career in Italy. However, articles that establish his overall cultural significance, the relationship of his non-Italian screenwriting to his Italian film work, and the relationship of his non-cinematic creative work to his cinematic work are also welcome.

*CFP* NEW CRITICAL APPROACHES TO THE GIALLO FILM, SPECIFIC CHAPTER BOOK

Essays are sought for an academic book that aims to examine the popular cycle of films widely known as “giallo.” Growing out of the Gothic Italian cycle (but influenced by foreign cycles such as the German “Krimi” film), the giallo film was a cultural and historical phenomenon. Meaning yellow in Italian, the giallo was an umbrella term for crime fiction, named after the bright yellow covers of cheap paperbacks ranging from Agatha Christie to Edgar Wallace. Soon enough, the term giallo was adopted to signify a Italian cycle of thriller cinema much closer to the horror film than the suspense or noir films made in America. Mario Bava kickstarted the cycle with two films, The Girl who Knew Too Much (La Ragazza che Sapeva Troppo, 1963) and Blood and Black Lace (Sei Donne per l’Assesino, 1964), while Dario Argento gave the definitive form with his The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (L’Uccello dalle Piume di Cristallo, 1970). The giallo film influenced its American counterparts, paving the path to the American slasher formula of the 1980s.

Even if there are two books on the subject, including Mikel Koven’s excellent La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film (McFarland, 2006) —a monograph recounting the history of the cycle­—, there is a strong lack on essays taking individual films for a close reading and analytical insight. Thus, for this collection, I am not interested in chapters engaging with an overview of the cycle but in essays analyzing individual, overlooked films and unexplored areas and directors. Essays on the usual “suspects” such as Bava or Argento are welcome, but my goal is offering a critical collection on the most neglected aspects of the cycle.

*CFP* "TRAJECTORIES OF ITALIAN CINEMA AND MEDIA", BOOK SERIES

Intellect is delighted to announce a new book series, Trajectories of Italian Cinema and Media, edited by Flavia Laviosa. This book series will build upon the success of the Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies also edited by Flavia Laviosa. Both the journal and the book series seeks to provide a forum for a diversity of voices and transnational perspectives on Italian cinema and media, and welcome proposals that discuss media as a distinct academic discipline focusing on theoretical approaches and aesthetics of texts within Italian social, political, economic and historical contexts. The series will publish its first title in early 2020.

The book series Trajectories of Italian Cinema and Media intends to engage with diverse academic communities, build new conceptual frameworks and foster a globally-focused and representative corpus of scholarship in Italian cinema and media studies. With the aim to explore new critical and historical trajectories, this book series seeks to trace the evidence of Italian cinema's international polysemy and polycentrism, define the extent of its inspirational force, examine other cinemas' artistic innovations resulting from their osmosis with the Italian film tradition and foster comparative analyses of themes and genres between Italian and other world cinemas.

*CFP* “’TI HO SENTITO GRIDARE FRANCESCO…' ANNA MAGNANI. ATTRICE, DIVA, ICONA", UNIVERSITÀ DI TORINO

“Ti ho sentito gridare Francesco…”Anna Magnani. Attrice, diva, icona

June 5-6-7 2019

Università di Torino

This conference aims at tackling through a variety of perspective the study of an Italian actress and star, whose iconic work has had a peculiar influence on the history of Italian and international cinema, and on the historical and social imaginary in general.

Her career in areas such as theater, music, and film, has spanned several crucial decades of the XX Century, from the 1930s to the early 1970s, molding the persona of an actress and star whose presencewas instrumental in shaping any context she inhabited, not only through the exceptional quality of her performances, but also through her ability to embody historically and socially situated subjectivities, as in the case of Italian neorealism, of which Anna Magnani is the most recognizable icon.

*CFP* "WITH HAT AND RED SCARF. THE BUILDING OF FEDERICO FELLINI'S PUBLIC IMAGE", SPECIAL ISSUE JOURNAL OF ITALIAN CINEMA AND MEDIA STUDIES

The centenary of the birth of director Federico Fellini in 2020 invites a unique opportunity to reassess his contribution to the history of Italian culture from new perspectives. With his monumental film production, which has been extensively studied—at least from La dolce vita forward—the Riminese director gradually seeped into Italy’s daily life. While his films have sparked lively debates since he first became popular in the 1950s, less attention has been devoted to the process that has led many scholars to consider him the emblematic figure of the film artist, both as a major character in the cultural history of Italy and as the symbol of what is quintessentially ‘Italian’.

Unlike other Italian directors, Fellini became a newsworthy and publicized figure beginning in the 1960s. He contributed to the creation of an ‘elusive’ image of himself (Hodsdon 2017) both through the construction of several cinematic alter-egos and through unmistakable appearances with his hat and red scarf in documentaries, feature films, illustrated news magazines, press and TV reports, and other forms of media. Equally, he emerged as a staunch defender of certain political and cultural struggles, such as those against television commercials or against Berlusconi (who was still an editor at that time). Additionally, he became an object of scrutiny and discussion for journalists, critics, cinephiles, colleagues, and biographers searching for an openly hagiographical definition of the threshold of the Italian artistic tradition.

*CFP* "THE INTERNATIONAL CIRCULATION OF NATIONAL CINEMAS AND AUDIOVISUAL CONTENT", CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF MILAN

The International Circulation of National Cinemas and Audiovisual Content: The Challenge of Convergence and Multiplatform Distribution in the European Context

Catholic University of Milan

17-18 September 2019

As one of the main outcomes of the “CInCIt: The International Circulation of Italian Cinema” research project, financed by the Italian Ministry for Universities and Higher Education (MIUR) under the auspices of the ‘PRIN 2015’ scheme, this conference aims to focus on the circulation and distribution of cinema and audiovisual content in the European contexts in a comparative way. Given the recent mutations of the film industry and distribution technology in the digital age, there are clear lines and trajectories that divide the European countries in terms of their ability to circulate their media products – and with them a specific image of a culture – across the continent.

*CFP* “ITALIAN FILM, COSTUME DESIGN AND FASHION FROM THE SILENT ERA TO THE PRESENT”, SPECIAL ISSUE JOURNAL OF ITALIAN CINEMA AND MEDIA STUDIES

Fashion and film share a highly interactive quality. As two of the most popular and widespread commercial industries to grow out of modernity, cinema and fashion have always had a synergetic relationship, both using the technology of the camera and that of the body and performance. Costume is integral both to the actor’s performance and to the cinematic rendition of visual narratives and experience. Since the birth of cinema in the late nineteenth century, the film scene has constituted a virtual shopping window for clothes, exhibiting and making desirable the newest fashions and goods available at the department stores. Film costume has not only borrowed from fashion and haute couture; it has also inspired the production of the newest fashions. Costumes in cinema have also been used as narrative tools for telling stories on screen that emphasize character identity and development while also attracting a larger audience. More recently, the digital genre of “fashion film” has become a widespread advertising and storytelling tool for fashion luxury brands as Ferragamo, Prada, Louis Vuitton, Dior amongst the others.

*CFP* "NEW DIRECTIONS IN ITALIAN FICTION", ISSUE 27 (SPRING 2019) LA FUSTA, THE DIGITAL ITALIAN STUDIES JOURNAL

La Fusta, the digital Italian Studies journal edited by the Italian Graduate Society at Rutgers University, is now welcoming submissions in English or Italian. Issue 27 (Spring 2019) will concentrate on the theme “New Generations of Italian Writers.” Articles, book reviews, and creative writing are being considered for publication.

Premio Strega, Premio Campiello, and other literary awards attract readerships as much as they did in the past. Some of the intellectuals emerging as best-selling authors, such as Camilleri and Ferrante, have written captivating stories which reflect the varied cultural landscape of Italy. Furthermore, while society and culture have always influenced literature, recent immigration to Italy has affected the works of writers to an unprecedented degree. We welcome articles that consider theoretical discussions about authorship and the figure of the author, social issues, multicultural communication, reflections on migration and integration, and the connection between ‘letteratura della migrazione’ and the mainstream literature.

*CFP* "GLOBAL INTERSECTIONS AND ARTISTIC INTERCONNECTIONS: ITALIAN CINEMA AND MEDIA ACROSS TIMES AND SPACES", SECOND INTERNATIONAL JICMS CONFERENCE

"Global Intersections and Artistic Interconnections: Italian Cinema and Media across Times and Spaces"

Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies Second International Conference

The American University of Rome 14-15 June 2019

Keynote Speaker

Professor Milly Buonanno, La Sapienza University

Since its inception in the mid-1950s, Italian domestic TV broadcasting and storytelling has established a close dialogue with national culture, identity and heritage. It would however be impossible to comprehensively account for the history and the peculiarities of Italian TV drama without bringing into the picture the ‘transnational factor’. Television storytelling in Italy has developed within a porous cultural space open to the influence of foreign art forms and creative media productions. National and non-national or transnational elements have met, co-existed and interacted frequently, albeit differently, within the television environment, helping to shape, maintain or modify the ‘Italian-ness’ of home-grown television fiction. This holds particularly true for narrative serialization – long considered a lowbrow form of popular storytelling to be resisted and rejected. Based on these premises, the paper aims to address the influence of the ‘transnational factor’ on key moments – and key narratives (La piovra, 1980s; Un posto al sole, 1990s; Gomorra: la serie, 2000s) – along the difficult road to serialization traveled by Italian TV drama.