[ecrea] CfP "Italian Cinema, Italian Identity" (International Conference)

We remind you that September 10, 2017 is the deadline for submitting 
proposals for the international conference “Italian Cinema, Italian 
Identity” (November 28-29, 2017 - University of Rome “Roma Tre”).

*CfP International Conference “Italian Cinema, Italian Identity. Visual 
Culture and National Imaginary between Tradition and Contemporaneity"*

The 23th edition of the International Conferences of Film Studies, 
organized since 1994 by the Department of Media and Performing Arts of 
Roma Tre University (now Department of Philosophy, Media and Performing 
Arts), addresses Italian identity and its cultural traits as represented 
in cinema, media and visual culture, considering the Italian tradition 
as well as the contemporary context.

​

Italian cinema, photography, television, and the recent narratives and 
aesthetic forms proposed by new media produce an anxiety-ridden national 
identity as historically problematic, as an unreconciled dimension.
The tormented search for a national tradition and for a perfect epos has 
nurtured the most intense moments of Italian iconic and audiovisual 
culture. This was signaled even at the beginning of the 20th century – 
when cinema was in its early stages – by broad nationalizing processes, 
when institutions posed Italian identity and characteristics at the 
center of cultural discourses.

​

From that moment on, cinema and each of the other media systems that 
could influence public discourses were progressively configured as 
“spaces of memory”, “hyperspaces”, or «collectors for multiple previous 
cultural, iconological and ideological systems» (Brunetta), that 
collected some of the most significant symbols and archetypes of 
national identity. Cinema hence embodied the perfect device for the 
realization, at an imaginary level, of the incomplete mission to make 
the Italians, or in other words to finally give a solution to the 
problem of the creation of an Italian subject (Stewart-Steinberg).

​

Italian film history testifies to how the «necessity to forge and unify 
an uneven population, with little self-consciousness» (Patriarca) has 
been progressively substituted by an anxiety which, sometimes in the 
form of a true existential anguish, reiterates in many, varied ways the 
idea of the Italian specificity as an undecided and “schizophrenic” 
condition, between modernity and backwardness.
Embodied therefore with drifting mythologies of identity re-foundation 
and the multiplication of identities and dis-identities, national 
cinema, media and visual culture, reaffirm again and again the antinomic 
status of Italian specificity and history, i.e. the laborious attempt to 
be open to the future, preserving at the same time a «basic caution 
toward modern civilization» (Bollati).

​

Possible areas of research, which could be addressed from a theoretical 
perspective or through specific case studies, include (but are not 
limited to):

​

  *
    History, memory and national identity
  *
    Italian politics and temperament
  *
    Epics and anti-epics: genres “Italian style”
  *
    Dis-identities in Italian cinema
  *
    “Italiani brava gente”: the myth of the “buon  italiano”
  *
    Aesthetics of realism in the national tradition
  *
    Masks of Italian-ness
  *
    Journeys to Italy: between mythology and documents
  *
    Portraiture and self-portraiture
  *
    Screenplays “Italian style”
  *
    The rhetoric of beauty and the idea of Italian-ness: bodies and
    landscapes
  *
    Regionalisms and the national dimension: cultures and languages
    between the local and
    global
  *
    National identity and European policies
  *
    Italian stardom: cinema and the faces of Italian-ness
  *
    The “Italian style” of acting
  *
    Cinema and the economy of Made in Italy, from the sixties to the 
present
  *
    Italian-ness and its images in international cinema
  *
    Italian professionals and their role in international film and media
    industries
  *
    Migration, imaginaries, and Italian identity
  *
    Diversity in contemporary Italian film and fiction
  *
    Women professionals and female subjectivities in Italian film and
    media industries
  *
    Representation of Italian feminisms and their relations with
    cultural production
  *
    Italian identity and documentary practices
  *
    Italian identity and “film works of cultural interest”

Please send 300-500 word proposals, including 5 keywords, 3-5 
bibliographic references and a short biography, by 10 September 2017 to 
(cinemaitaliano /at/ uniroma3.it) <mailto:(cinemaitaliano /at/ uniroma3.it)>

Website: https://cinemaitaliano8.wixsite.com/cinemaeidentita

The results of the selection will be communicated by 30 September 2017.

​

Official languages of the Conference: English, French, Italian.

​

Conference fees:

Early registration (before 15 October 2017):

  70€ (lecturers and professors).
  40€ (independent scholars).

  Late registration (after 15 October 2017):

​

  90€ (lecturers and professors);
  60€ (independent scholars).


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