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

**

*Italian Cinema, Italian Identity:*
*Visual Culture and National Imaginary Between Tradition and 
Contemporaneity*

International Conference of Film and Media Studies

by Stefania Parigi, Christian Uva, Vito Zagarrio

*28-29 November 2017*

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 20^th  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 gent//e/”: 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)>

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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