*CFP* "ESTUDIOS DE FANS EN IBEROAMÉRICA", Nº38 (2022-2), REVISTA CONTRATEXTO

Estudios de fans en Latinoamérica

Revista Contratexto

Sección Dosier

Fecha límite: 15 de mayo de 2022

El número 38 de Contratexto se centrará en los estudios del fenómeno fan en Iberoamérica.

Editoras invitadas: María José Establés (Universidad de Nebrija, España), María del Mar Guerrero Pico (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, España), Johanna Montauban Bryce (Universidad de Lima, Perú). Se recibirán artículos originales o ensayos que aborden de modo preferente alguno(s) de lossiguientes ejes temáticos:

● Media fandom (series de televisión, cine, videojuegos, novelas, cómics y manga…)
● Otros objetos de fandom: música, deportes…
● Fandoms del ámbito hispanohablante y de la lusofonía (telenovelas, influencers, youtubers…)

*CFP* "EXHIBITING THE HOLOCAUST IN THE IMMEDIATE POSTWAR PERIOD: HISTORIES, PRACTICES AND POLITICS", SPECIAL ISSUE, THE JOURNAL OF HOLOCAUST RESEARCH

Exhibitions were a crucial medium of Holocaust memory in the immediate postwar period. Between 1944-1950, hundreds of exhibitions were mounted across war torn Europe and the United States that sought to tell the story of World War II, Nazi Crimes, and the Holocaust. Already on the day after liberation, the process of “museumification” was initiated. Political prisoners and Allied soldiers organized impromptu site-specific exhibits in the concentration and extermination camps. Small, low-tech, DIY exhibitions were mounted in the Displaced Persons camps and Historical Commissions by Jewish survivors. Impressive blockbusters sponsored by governmental ministries and international organizations, such as the United Nations War Crimes Commission, opened in museums across Europe. Varying in their budgets, resources, tone, media, and function, these exhibitions were intended to convince and convict but also to inform, educate, and commemorate. Whether meticulously planned and generously funded or makeshift and improvised, they offered their visitors a different “way of seeing” and interpreting the violence, atrocity, and human rights abuses of the recent past.

Exhibitions not only illustrate history, they also shape it. Despite their central role in shaping our understanding and representation of Nazi crimes and victim experiences, these early postwar exhibitions have received little scholarly attention to date. Yet their impact rivals the media of monuments, photography, and film, cutting across national and political lines and belying the “Myth of Silence” regarding the postwar period that David Cesarani so persuasively debunked. Reconstructing these exhibition histories can tell us a great deal about how different nations, communities, and individuals chose to remember, and what they privileged and understood about the war. It can help us construct a historiography of Holocaust representation, tracing the canonization of certain practices and images, as well as certain modes of presentation. This special issue hopes to offer a more nuanced understanding of exhibitions as a neglected but important medium of early Holocaust memory.

*CFP* "BORDERS AND DETECTIVE FICTION", THEME ISSUE, CLUES: A JOURNAL OF DETECTION

For this theme issue of Clues, proposals are sought from a wide variety of critical, national, and cultural perspectives addressing how and why borders are represented in detective fiction, film, television, or other media (e.g., computer games, graphic novels, radio drama, podcasts). As David Newman and Anssi Paasi argue, “The construction of boundaries at all scales and dimensions takes place through narrativity.” Thus, it makes sense to turn to the detective story, a genre whose plots conceptualize issues of morality, legality, security, and transgression to understand the ways in which borders are conceptualized and mediated. Crossing borders can signify openness, mobility, cultural exchange, and cooperation. But the border can also be a site of surveillance, discipline, risk, exclusion, and violence, a place where geographic, cultural, economic, and bodily integrity are rendered vulnerable. It can, in short, be the scene of (the) crime. How do imaginative narratives across the diverse range of historical and contemporary crime fiction constitute investigations of defined, dynamic, and/or developing border spaces?

Suggested topics:

• Detective fiction and migrancy/refugees 

*CFP* "FROM THE SCENIC ESSAY TO THE ESSAY-EXHIBITION. EXPANDING THE ESSAY FORM IN THE ARTS AFTER LITERATURE AND FILM", S:PAM CONFERENCE

From the Scenic Essay to the Essay-Exhibition. Expanding the Essay Form in the Arts after Literature and Film

S:PAM (Studies in Performing Arts & Media)

Ghent University (Belgium)

27th-29th of April 2022

 

 

More than 400 years after the publication of Michel De Montaigne’s Essais, the enduring afterlife of the essay form attests how this 'heretical form’ (Adorno) not only continues to challenge the literary conventions but also transgresses the borders of the literary field to venture into other artistic disciplines. The genre of the essay film is the most prominent example of this dissemination but the expansion has set out into other areas as well. Engaging with this emerging prominence, From the Scenic to the Essay-Exhibition welcomes scholars and art practitioners to present their academic and artistic engagements with the essay form.

*CFP* "SOCIEDAD E IDENTIDAD EN EL AUDIOVISUAL LATINOAMERICANO Y ESPAÑOL", NÚMERO ENERO 2022, MIGUEL HERNÁNDEZ COMMUNICATION JOURNAL

A lo largo del siglo XX, los medios audiovisuales han sido los constructores más potentes de imaginarios sociales e identitarios. En el siglo XXI, la realidad de la globalización, la generalización de Internet y de las redes sociales y el surgimiento de las plataformas de consumo online han impulsado exponencialmente el intercambio cultural de dichos imaginarios. Se ha conformado así una cultura global que aglutina de forma paradójica la homogeneidad y la diversidad.

Por este motivo, este monográfico intenta responder a algunas cuestiones que se plantean en torno a la construcción de los imaginarios audiovisuales y suscitar el análisis de esta realidad compleja, tanto en el pasado como en el presente. El espacio de debate propuesto establece como marco la producción audiovisual (cine, televisión y otros canales posibles) de España y de Latinoamérica, con el fin de centrarse en la evolución social de estos ámbitos geográficos a partir de su representación en los medios.

A continuación, se proponen algunas líneas generales, aunque no exclusivas en torno al tema propuesto para el monográfico

*CFP* "MEDIATING MOTHER-ACTIVISM", BOOK CHAPTER

Recent years have seen a renewed interest in exploring motherhood and mothering as political and emotional resources for digital activism. Although the intertwinement of mothering and politics predates the digital context, feminist debates around the politicization of mothering, from protests against state killings and disappearances, via the role of the mother in nation-building, to advocacy for right wing populisms, need addressing all the more urgently as we endeavour to understand the ways in which mothering is not only mediatised, but agentively deployed across social media platforms. The political role and significance of the mother, the uneasy relation between motherhood as gendered identity and mothering as daily practice, continue to be contentious issues for feminists (Rich 1976, DiQuinzio 1999, Gumbs, Martens and Williams 2016, Naber 2021). Mother-activists have historically constructed public issues from their personal experiences of suffering and loss within family structures (Reiger 2000), utilizing the symbolic power of motherhood in order to motivate others to join their causes (Logsdon Conradsen 2011). Notwithstanding, campaigns such those of the Argentinian Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo have been cast as ‘trapped by a bad script’ (Taylor 1997), that is as reproducing the same narratives of familialism and heteropatriarchal bloodline that underpin the narrative of the state. Conversely, many feminist scholars have argued that the political mobilisation of the trope of the mother has the potential to challenge the ‘official’ frameworks of national, ethnic or other group loyalty and to undermine or to radically reframe these very narratives (Kim 2020, Athanasiou 2017, Carreon and Moghadam 2015). For example, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo have raised the slogan ‘One child, all the children’ (Sosa 2014), taking the campaign beyond limits of blood kinship.

*CFP* "BLACK AND QUEER, MUSIC ON SCREEN", SPECIAL ISSUE, LIQUID BLACKNESS: JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS AND BLACK STUDIES

This special issue of liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies proposes to work on Black Queer expression in audiovisual musics cutting across histories of the avant-garde, popular audiovisuality, and frameworks both transnational and critically transhistorical. The goal of the issue is to set up the framework for a survey of Black and Queer musicality in audiovisual media so as to suggest “non-contemporaneous” dialogues between and across historical registers and media platforms, so that the critical expressive power of non-conforming persons of color become a given rather than an alibi, an absence, or a projection.

From early sound cinema to the present, queer or gender non-conforming black artists have voiced a complex series of claims, propositions, demands, and desires, from the introduction of sound to the cinematic screen to the introduction of social media video in networked digital cultures. Black feminist and queer scholarship has often engaged with the meanings and powers expressed in these works, or in musical artists indebted to them or referencing them, from Angela Davis’ reading of transformations of historical memory in Smith’s St. Louis Blues (Blues Legacies and Black Feminisms), to Lindon Barrett’s study of Billie Holiday (Blackness and Value), to Saidiya Hartman’s discussion of errancy in relation to woman-identified women singers in the early years of recording (Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments), and Daphne Brooks’ recent reading of black women’s use of arrangement, sonic curation, and blackness as technology (Liner Notes for the Revolution) in articulating a politics of being and becoming. 

*CFP* "FEMMES FATALES. MEN IN CRISIS: REEXAMINING GENDER REPRESENTATIONS IN FILM NOIR", SPECIAL ISSUE, GENRE EN SÉRIES: CINÉMA, TÉLÉVISION, MÉDIAS JOURNAL

Ever since their emergence in the field of academia, gender studies have looked closely at Hollywood film noir and neo-noir. Following the seminal book Women in Film Noir, edited by E. Ann Kaplan (1rst ed. 1978, 2nd ed. 1998), important works have examined, using a psychoanalytic prism, the feminine (Doane 1991) and masculine (Krutnik 1991) characters of this genre, before others used a variety of approaches more attentive to socio-historical factors. The gender issues of Hollywood film noir from the 1940s and 1950s were thus placed in a context marked by the upheavals of war and the post-war period, as well as by the development of consumer society and urban modernity (see, among others, Cohan 1997, Biesen 2005, Jankovich 2011), while their reinvestment by neo-noir from the 1980s onwards raised new questions about the ideological implications of such a generic recycling process, caught between the effects of sexual liberation and the persistence of a puritanical morality (Letort 2007). 

Whereas some chapters of Women in Film Noir (Dyer 1998a and Kaplan 1998b) already pointed to the complexity and heterogeneity of gendered representations initially perceived as univocally misogynous, subsequent studies have further deconstructed this reductive vision (Cowie 1993, Spicer 2002, Hanson 2007, Grossman 2009, etc.) by discussing the relevance and the limits of notions such as “femmes fatales” and “men in crisis” with regard to the variety of models of femininity and masculinity proposed by film noir (“girls next door”, “good-bad girl”, “weak guy”, “damaged man”, “tough guy”, etc.), from the classical period to the contemporary era.

*CFP* "(DE)CONSTRUCTING ITALIANS: GLOBAL PRODUCTION AND RECEPTION OF ITALIAN CHARACTERS", INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

(De)Constructing Italians: Global Production and Reception of Italian Characters

International Conference

Milan, December 2-3 2021

 

 

The conference will develop along two key dimensions. The first one, mostly narratological, will investigate the dynamics of the character in relation to the specificities of the texts and the relationships they establish with their user. The second dimension, chiefly socio-anthropological, psychological and economic, will focus on the relationships of characters with broader social and cultural processes.

Authors interested in contributing to the conference are invited to send an abstract (maximum 250 words, excluding bibliography), in Italian or English, to convegno.decoitalians@unicatt.it.

 

*CFP* "TRANSNATIONAL DIMENSIONS IN DIGITAL ACTIVISM AND PROTEST", THEMED ISSUE, REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION JOURNAL

Giuliana Sorce & Delia Dumitrica are currently seeking submissions for a themed issue on Transnational Dimensions in Digital Activism and Protest to be published in the Review of Communication, a flagship journal of the National Communication Association (NCA). There are no APCs and submission and publication is free. Please see the full CFP below. This themed issue aims to map international perspectives on transnational processes in digital activism and protest. Against wider claims that social movements and citizen activism are shifting from the logic of spatial organization to networked flows (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012; Mercea, 2020), this themed issue seeks to illuminate how the global and local come together in networked public spheres. Recent transnational movements such as #MeToo or Black Lives Matter yield the importance of interweaving digital communication, pre-existing activist collectives, and citizen activation on a seemingly global scale. The policing of physical protests during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic have intensified reliance on digital technologies among activists and grassroots collectives (Sorce & Dumitrica, 2021), further enhancing the appeal to create transnational ties and globalize movement appeals.

We ask how political causes circulate globally, what role digital technologies play, and ultimately, what “transnational” means for seemingly universal causes, global collective identity, and activist ractice. In reflecting how activists across the globe employ digital media to construct a civic imaginary of a transnational polity, attention must be paid to the dialectical nature of transnational processes that simultaneously magnify the importance of locality while normalizing hybridity (Roudometof, 2016; Kraidy, 2005; Pieterse, 2015).

*CFP* "SOUTH KOREAN WOMEN'S CINEMA", ONLINE CONFERENCE

South Korean Women’s Cinema

Online conference 23-25 September 2021

Sheffield Hallam University (United Kingdom)

Funded by The Academy of Korean Studies

 

While the profile and popularity of Korean cinema abroad has peaked with the success of multi-Oscar award-winning film Parasite (Bong Joon-ho, 2019), women’s cinema and women filmmakers’ wide-ranging contribution to Korean cinema have been consistently overlooked by film audiences and academics alike. Such neglect is evident in a dearth of English-language sources on women filmmakers in the Korean film studies scholarship. As the first major English-language conference focused solely on Korean women’s cinema, the conference aims first of all to celebrate Korean women filmmakers (from pioneers to new generation) and contributions they have made in the history of Korean cinema. The event also intends to provide a site that enables the feminist film scholars to explore a range of topics and issues that include what it means to do women’s cinema in Korea and the relationship between activism and cinema, as well as addressing gender equality, LGBTQ+ rights, and the #MeToo Movement within the Korean film industry and wider fields. In addition, the conference seeks to illuminate the current status of women’s cinema and to envisage future trends.

*CFP* "DISTRIBUTION IN THE STREAMING ERA", SPECIAL ISSUE, VELVET LIGHT TRAP JOURNAL

Over the past decade, the media ecology has been dramatically shifting with the advent of online “overthe-top” streaming services, the streaming wars that followed, and the platformization of the web. As the distance between big tech companies and legacy media players rapidly dwindles, rippling effects can be felt across industries, audience practices, regulatory frameworks, and more. Simultaneously, the rise of streaming services also continues to provoke further theorizations on topics that have concerned media scholars for decades regarding the asymmetrical dynamics of power and influence as it relates to globalization processes, representation, identity, politics, cultural and national mediations, and economic development.

For this issue, we welcome submissions that examine the impact that streaming services have had on the contemporary media environment. Topic areas can include, but are not limited to the shifting industrial practices, labor, audience behaviors and engagement, algorithms, content moderation, formal changes in the text, marketing, transnational/global flows, and regulation. Further, while streaming services may often prioritize rhetorics of disruption and innovation in their marketing parlance, there are also historical continuities that are equally important to emphasize. In what ways have streaming services transformed the way we understand film and television? What kinds of cultural issues continue to persist in spite of these disruptions? In what ways are disparate industries now converging/diverging and how can we understand these changes and analyze them effectively?

*CFP* "ADOPTION, KINSHIP, CULTURE: ENGAGING THE PAST, IMAGINING THE FUTURE", ASAC 2021 EIGHTH BIENNIAL VIRTUAL CONFERENCE

Adoption, Kinship, Culture: Engaging the Past, Imagining the Future

ASAC 2021 Eighth Biennial Virtual Conference

Gatherings for Q&A on Zoom: Oct. 15, 10am-7pm EST

 

Adoption, Kinship, Culture: Engaging the Past, Imagining the Future, hosted by The Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture (ASAC), considers crossing boundaries, changing discourses, and new kinship formations to imagine the futures of adoption. This conference investigates what adoption, foster care, kinship, and assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) might look like in the coming decades. What discourses, representations, practices, policies, and laws will change and which will stay the same, and why? Who and what will lead the way? As we speculate about the futures of adoption, we cannot ignore the innumerable pasts and the complexities of our present moment. Thus, we also ask, how has the past informed, anticipated, or rejected the future? What will be the effects of the past on our future kinships?

*CFP* "BEHIND THE SCREEN AND OFF THE STAGE: FILM AND TELEVISION REPRESENTATIONS OF AMERICAN ENTERTAINMENT", TWO-DAY VIRTUAL CONFERENCE

Behind the Screen and Off the Stage: Film and Television Representations of American Entertainment

Two-Day Virtual Conference

12 and 13 November 2021

London Metropolitan University

 

Movies and television shows set in the world of American entertainment have been a central feature of the big and small screens since the early days of Hollywood. From the backstage musical to the star biopic, and from the rise-and-fall narrative to critiques of the business of show, screen narratives have repeatedly sought to dramatize life behind the scenes of American entertainment. Their persistent allure is illustrated in film and television history ranging from Show People (1928) to All About Eve (1950), and from Valley of the Dolls (1967) to Fosse/Verdon (2019) and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020). The ten Oscar nominations announced for David Fincher’s 2020 film Mank only reinforce the appeal of the genre for audiences, directors and the film and television industries as reflections on entertainment history in the digital age.

*CFP* "DIGITAL INEQUALITIES IN MULTICULTURAL CONTEXTS: A GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE", BOOK CHAPTER

Today, we observe how multicultural societies in the Global South and Global North regions of the world are facing new challenges brought up by the digital divide. Previously analysed by scholars as inequalities in access to Internet and ICTs (van Dijk, 2013) and in use of digital technologies (Helsper, 2002), today digital divide has extended to new levels, forms and domains. This includes inequalities in benefits or tangible outcomes people receive through their online engagement (van Dijk, 2020), different level of users’ digital capital (Gladkova, Vartanova, & Ragnedda, 2020), and previously understudied gaps such as algorithms divide (Ragnedda, 2020). Given the fact that social and digital inequalities tend to reinforce each other, those who are more socially advantaged tend to get the most out of the Internet, further reinforcing their social position by using ICTs. This problem gains particular importance in big multicultural and multi-ethnic societies, where providing equal opportunities for online engagement for all minor groups spread across a huge territory of the country can be a serious challenge.

Previous research on Russia (Vartanova, & Gladkova, 2019), Brazil (Nishijima et al, 2017), China (Song et al, 2020), India (Rani, 2020), South Africa (Mutsvairo, & Ragnedda, 2019) and many other multicultural nations that have so far received less coverage in scholarly literature compared to European countries (van Deursen, & van Dijk, 2013), Middle East (Jamil, 2020) or the U.S. (Dutton, & Reisdorf, 2019) showed that many ethnic and cultural groups across the globe face common difficulties in accessing Internet and ICTs. Many indigenous groups are traditionally based in regions that are less economically advantaged or have harsh climatic conditions and low urbanization level, which affects cost and speed of connection, as well as availability of infrastructure and ICTs to a broad population in those regions. 

*CFP* "SERIALITY AND STREAMING", SPECIAL ISSUE, GLOBAL STORYTELLING JOURNAL

This special issue of Global Storytelling will investigate how streaming media has impacted the production, distribution, and reception of serial narratives. Television research, beginning with Herta Herzog’s landmark study of radio listeners “On Borrowed Experience”, privileged the soap opera as an object of research due to the special problems posed by seriality and melodrama and the construction of gender within the text and within the audience. When prime-time serials Dallas and Dynasty achieved sensational success both domestically and internationally, and the fear of “Wall-to-Wall Dallas” swept Europe, important foundational works in television studies by Robert C. Allen, Ien Ang, Elihu Katz and Tamar Liebes, Jostein Gripsrud, Jane Feuer, Dorothy Hobson, Tania Modleski, Charlotte Brunsdon and others used television serials to consider questions of reception, cross-cultural readings, and the problematics of genre and ideology. Today, seriality is less the exception than the rule for the offerings of subscription streaming platforms in all genres and is a core industrial strategy for courting audiences in an increasingly crowded marketplace.

The development of streaming platforms and new distribution strategies in which entire seasons of new television shows are “dropped” online on one day have only complicated contemporary theorizations of the production and consumption of serialized narratives. Netflix routinely releases its first-run television serials as entire seasons, while other platforms premiere a handful of episodes simultaneously to entice viewers, then switch to a more conventional schedule of weekly single episodes. Web series such as Skam (in its various transnational incarnations) craft soap opera narratives at the intersection of fictive social media posts and videos that play in real storyworld time, weaving serial narratives into the everyday lives of audiences through their phones, tablets and laptops.

*CFP* "THE GLOBAL AND THE LOCAL IN POSTMILLENNIAL EUROPE", 9TH INTERNATIONAL SELICUP CONFERENCE

The Global and the Local in Postmillennial Europe

9th International SELICUP Conference (Spanish Society for the Study of Popular Culture)

An Online Event 21 –23 October 2021, Košice, Slovakia

 

Scholarly debates increasingly revolve around the influence of global economic processes on cultural production. As Jeffrey Nealon (2012) argues, contemporary concerns with the ‘structuring mutations in the relations among cultural production and economic production’ have gained prominence as a reaction to intensified neoliberalism and globalization. Nealon has noted how capitalism has lately increased its control over social and cultural mechanisms—an increase he relates to the ‘intensification of the existing biopolitical sources’. The relationships between globalization, cultural production and identity construction are further complicated by the myriad processes that have fundamentally reconfigured the economic, political, social and cultural spheres. Representing both the ‘tendency towards homogeneity, synchronization, integration, unity and universalism’ and the ‘propensity for localization, heterogeneity, differentiation, diversity and particularism’ (Bornman, 2003), globalization seems to give rise to structural tension in postmillennial societies.

*CFP* "MEDIATIZATION, NEW FORMS OF MILITANCY AND DIGITALIZATION", 5TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE COMSYMBOL

5th International Conference ComSymbol

Mediatization, New Forms of Militancy and Digitalization

Paul Valéry University Montpellier 3, Centre Universitaire du Guesclin

November 11-12, 2021, Béziers, France

 

The 5th edition of the International Conference ComSymbol remains associated to the questioning of complex symbolic socio-communicational constructions that participate in social, societal, economic, political, cultural news by focusing, this time, both on the relations of dominance of the logics of the media over the other logics of the society and on the transformations of the communicative construction of reality under the impact of digitalization concerning the contemporary militant movements engaged in the “communicational arms race” (Neveu, 2015) marked by the redeployment of collective action on the Internet and the presence of pluralistic media systems (mass media, emerging media, Internet, Artificial Intelligence-AI, etc.).

*CFP* "RETHINKING CULTURE, MEDIA AND CREATIVE INDUSTRIES IN THE ERA OF COVID", ONLINE CONFERENCE

The Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries of King’s College London will host its first online postgraduate conference – Rethinking Culture, Media and Creative Industries in the Era of Covid – in July 2021. This year, the CMCI PGR conference will set out to explore and re-evaluate the cultural, media and creative industries during and after the Covid-19 pandemic. This conference will provide a forum to examine and reflect on how the challenges of the past year have reshaped and will reshape both our cultural landscape and research practices. The conference – organised by a committee of CMCI postgraduate research students – will take place on 1-2 July 2021 via Zoom and will be live-streamed on YouTube.

We invite researchers and practitioners from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and with a particular interest in culture, media and creative industries to present original empirical and theoretical research at this year’s Rethinking Culture, Media and Creative Industries in the Era of Covid conference. The years 2020/21 have brought to the fore global issues of social inequality and exclusion, working practices, digital cultures, sustainability, political structures, cultural production and consumption, etc. Not only Covid-related themes but those focusing on other relevant contemporary developments are also welcome. We especially encourage submissions by doctoral students and early career researchers from all around the world.

*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.