Third International Conference
16 - 18 June 2022
The American University of Rome
Call for Papers coming soon
16 - 18 June 2022
The American University of Rome
Call for Papers coming soon
Italian Cinema and Media Studies listserv
The Editorial Board of the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies is pleased to announce a new listserv. The list provides a space for announcements (publications, events, news, CFPs) and a forum for the scholarly discussion and debate of issues pertaining to the cinema and media (television, radio, digital, etc.) in Italy, including in its transnational and transmedia dimensions.
To sign up for the Italian Cinema and Media Studies listserv, go to https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=ICMS&A=1. Once you have signed up, you will be able to receive and post information via email.
This forum welcomes students, scholars and professionals interested in fruitful exchanges pertaining to Italian cinema and media studies in the world. Please advertise it to your graduate students and other contacts and encourage them to sign up so that we can expand its reach even further.
Please use this list to spread the word about initiatives you are involved in: new publications, CFPs, events, news, etc. Requests for advice and information are also welcome. We also accept attachments and images (but you may want to avoid very large files and we cannot take responsibility if embedded images don’t display correctly on some devices). Please also feel free to raise topics for discussion relevant to our field.
Call for Papers
Italian cinema and media: Past and present, continuity and change, expectations for the future
International students at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome: 1935 – 2020. A history to be written
Past and Present Intersections among Italian, Russian, Soviet and Post-Socialist Cinemas and Media
Italian cinema and media: Past and present, continuity and change, expectations for the future
International students at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome: 1935 – 2020. A history to be written
Past and Present Intersections among Italian, Russian, Soviet and Post-Socialist Cinemas and Media
Italian cinema and media: Past and present, continuity and change, expectations for the future
Third Edition of the Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies International Conference
In person ONLY
The American University of Rome
16-18 June 2022
Keynote Speaker
Professor Stephen Gundle
University of Warwick, UK
'Looking Back, Looking Forward: The Changing Shape of Italian Cinema and Media Studies'
This address will explore the way the landscape of Italian film studies has changed in recent decades both in Italy and abroad. It will consider, among other things, the way in which ideas of a canon have been challenged and reinterpreted, evolutions in (and displacements of) efforts to interpret Italian film production as a whole, the impact of the decline of Italian cinema as a commercial and artistic powerhouse on the study of film, and the growing attention to television and new media. The address will re-visit and assess recent and not-so-recent attempts to judge the study of Italian cinema as a field or to shift the agenda in some way. It will conclude by seeking (modestly) to indicate some possible fruitful avenues of future research.
Stephen Gundle is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. A cultural and political historian, he has always paid close attention to Italian cinema and television. Among his books are Between Hollywood and Moscow: The Italian Communists and the Challenge of Mass Culture, 1943-91 (Duke, 2000; Italian edition Giunti, 1995); Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War (with David Forgacs, Indiana, 2007; Italian edition Il Mulino, 2007); Bellissima: Feminine Beauty and the Idea of Italy (Yale, 2007; Italian edition Laterza 2007); Glamour: A History (OUP, 2008); Death and the Dolce Vita (Canongate, 2011; Italian edition Rizzoli, 2012); Mussolini's Dream Factory (Berghahn, 2013; Italian edition Kaplan, forthcoming); Fame amid the Ruins (Berghahn, 2020).
Organizing Committee
Flavia Laviosa, Wellesley College, United States
Catherine Ramsey-Portolano, The American University of Rome, Italy
Scientific Council
Sharofat Arabova, State Tojikfilm Institution, Dushanbe, Tajikistan
Luca Barra, University of Bologna, Italy
Benoît Carbone, Marco, Brunel University, United Kingdom
Giorgio Bertellini, University of Michigan, United States
Katarzyna Biernacka-Licznar, University of Wroclaw, Poland
Flavia Brizio-Skov, University of Tennessee, United States
Milly Buonanno, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
Frank Burke, Queen’s University, Canada
Jim Carter, Boston University, United States
Venesa Coscia, (CONICET) University of Buenos Aires, Argentina
Franca Faccioli, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
Anastasia Grusha, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia
Monica Jansen, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Karol Jóźwiak, University of Lodz, Poland
Bernadette Luciano, University of Auckland, New Zealand
Annachiara Mariani, University of Tennessee, United States
Alex Marlow-Mann, University of Kent, United Kingdom
Mariano Mestman, (CONICET) University of Buenos Aires, Argentina
Anna Miller-Klejsa, University of Lodz, Poland
Laura Rascaroli, University College Cork, Ireland
Susanna Scarparo, University of Sydney, Australia
Svetlana Sidorova, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia
Maria Bonaria Urban, Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome, Italy
Alessandra Vannucci, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Gaoheng Zhang, University of British Columbia, Canada
The year 2022 marks the 10th anniversary of the publication of the first issue of the Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies. Published by Intellect (UK) and co-sponsored by Wellesley College (USA), it remains the only English language journal on Italian cinema and media.
In the past ten years, we have been inclusive in our efforts to establish connections with scholars from several continents. We have also made it our mission to explore the resonance of Italian film in the world across times, themes, styles and genres. After publishing the first four issues— two on Italy and Asia (2:1 & 2:3, 2014), a third on Italy and Latin America (10:2, 2022), and the fourth one on Italy and post-socialist countries (2023), and organizing two international conferences (2027 & 2019), the Journal has created a large community of scholars of diverse disciplines, all engaged in studying the artistic intersections between Italy and other countries.
As we celebrate this anniversary, we are prepared to move forward with new explorations and discussions aimed at expanding these interconnected academic communities, with a focus on a broader understanding of Italian cinema and media in international artistic contexts.
The past decade has marked a series of successes for the Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies. This has coincided with a period during which the global media landscape has undergone remarkable transformations: from the Internet and World Wide Web to the rise of social networks and their deep impact on social interactions; from the ubiquitous smartphone emerging as the quintessential example of media convergence to the new conglomerates of a fast-changing panorama of platforms, devices and streaming services.
As media systems are always both driven by and the drivers of technological and social transformations, they are inextricable from new forms of everyday life, politics, society and culture, which scholarship must understand, analyse, and challenge.
With evolving media comes the development of new economies, production policies and distribution platforms, which match new and diverse formats, audiences, consumption patterns and modalities of interaction with the moving image. The relation of traditional cinema with evolving technologies, screen media, visual cultures and digital, social and interactive platforms has reconfigured what cinema means as production, consumption and prosumerism take shape under new landscapes of transmedia content and transnational audiences. From Netflix to YouTube and from Instagram to TikTok, cinematic and screen languages have accommodated the messages, interactions, arts and expressions of a changing world. This is a world dominated by an awareness of the urgency of climate, humanitarian, health and economic crises, along with the rise of movements for change and equality, including #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, which take on a global significance as well as cognizance of national- and region-specific approaches.
All of these changes have affected the ways we can and should look at cinema and media broadly speaking, but also how we can conceive of the cultural complexities of Italian histories and cultures and what challenges are faced by scholarship over the next years. Understanding Italian cinema and media cultures today means looking at how Italian cinema finds a place in the new media ecologies and economies at a national and transnational level as well as how YouTube, TikTok and social media have offered audiences new ways to narrate Italian cultures and specificities, how Italians communicate their diverse identities, and how these are shaped by new dynamics of inter-relation and distinction.
Looking at Italian cinema and media today thus also means understanding how the changing landscape of the cinema and media play an essential role in reframing Italian-ness in a changing national and global culture. New media have inherited the traditional forms in which our identities have been communicated, from our histories and the arts traditions on Instagram to YouTubers discussing our food cultures and Made in Italy design sensibilities. Social media have created new symbolic and relational bonds in the transnational web of connections and distinctions that tie Italians at home to those abroad. Media also have played and will play a key role in framing and re-framing the place of Italy in a postcolonial and decolonised perspective, offering visibility and providing points of access for non-white-centric ideas of Italian-ness, new subjectivities, and groups advocating for key issues such as migrants’ rights and an inclusive citizenship model for second-generation Italians.
As Italian media and cinema productions, agents, and audiences both national and transnational represent a lively and complex terrain of analysis, JICMS strives to capture and understand their complexities in all their newly-evolving forms.
As we reflect on the state of the disciplines (cinema and media studies), we open this CFP to a wide range of themes, with the intent of offering a unifying horizon that will allow scholars to explore diverse fields and topics in a broad international context and move forward with new studies, building the future of both the discipline and the journal.
With this CFP, the conference organizers invite proposals from scholars, independent researchers, cinema and media professionals, and graduate students for single papers, pre-constituted panels, and roundtables.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
The languages of the conference are English and Italian. Proposals for virtual papers will not be considered.
Please send an abstract of 250 words plus a short bio of 100 words for single papers, or 350 words for panels (including the aims of the panel and summaries of each contribution specifying the names of filmmakers, artists, films, media etc.) followed by individual titles, panelists’ bios, current academic affiliation, and emails for pre-constituted panels with 3 speakers, or roundtables in Italian or in English in a word.doc format, no pdf. We invite proposals for 20-minute presentations (inclusive of film clips). We welcome presentations using both conventional tools and video-essay commentaries.
Abstracts for consideration should be submitted to Flavia Laviosa at [email protected].
The deadline for the submission of abstracts is 5 January 2022. Notification of acceptance of abstracts will be sent out to authors by 15 January 2022.
Participants will receive a complimentary copy of JICMS and will be able to purchase Intellect publications at a special conference discounted price.
Conference registration fee includes: 2 lunches, opening and closing receptions.
The deadline for inclusion in the conference program is 15 March 2022. Please, make every effort to pay conference fees before this date.
€ 200 regular rate (€ 100 for 1 day)
€ 150 student rate (€ 75 for 1 day)
The registration fee will be paid to AUR and the website will be available in January 2022.
In case of withdrawals the registration fee will not be reimbursed.
In case of cancellation of the conference the registration fee will be reimbursed.
Third Edition of the Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies International Conference
In person ONLY
The American University of Rome
16-18 June 2022
Keynote Speaker
Professor Stephen Gundle
University of Warwick, UK
'Looking Back, Looking Forward: The Changing Shape of Italian Cinema and Media Studies'
This address will explore the way the landscape of Italian film studies has changed in recent decades both in Italy and abroad. It will consider, among other things, the way in which ideas of a canon have been challenged and reinterpreted, evolutions in (and displacements of) efforts to interpret Italian film production as a whole, the impact of the decline of Italian cinema as a commercial and artistic powerhouse on the study of film, and the growing attention to television and new media. The address will re-visit and assess recent and not-so-recent attempts to judge the study of Italian cinema as a field or to shift the agenda in some way. It will conclude by seeking (modestly) to indicate some possible fruitful avenues of future research.
Stephen Gundle is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. A cultural and political historian, he has always paid close attention to Italian cinema and television. Among his books are Between Hollywood and Moscow: The Italian Communists and the Challenge of Mass Culture, 1943-91 (Duke, 2000; Italian edition Giunti, 1995); Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War (with David Forgacs, Indiana, 2007; Italian edition Il Mulino, 2007); Bellissima: Feminine Beauty and the Idea of Italy (Yale, 2007; Italian edition Laterza 2007); Glamour: A History (OUP, 2008); Death and the Dolce Vita (Canongate, 2011; Italian edition Rizzoli, 2012); Mussolini's Dream Factory (Berghahn, 2013; Italian edition Kaplan, forthcoming); Fame amid the Ruins (Berghahn, 2020).
Organizing Committee
Flavia Laviosa, Wellesley College, United States
Catherine Ramsey-Portolano, The American University of Rome, Italy
Scientific Council
Sharofat Arabova, State Tojikfilm Institution, Dushanbe, Tajikistan
Luca Barra, University of Bologna, Italy
Benoît Carbone, Marco, Brunel University, United Kingdom
Giorgio Bertellini, University of Michigan, United States
Katarzyna Biernacka-Licznar, University of Wroclaw, Poland
Flavia Brizio-Skov, University of Tennessee, United States
Milly Buonanno, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
Frank Burke, Queen’s University, Canada
Jim Carter, Boston University, United States
Venesa Coscia, (CONICET) University of Buenos Aires, Argentina
Franca Faccioli, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
Anastasia Grusha, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia
Monica Jansen, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Karol Jóźwiak, University of Lodz, Poland
Bernadette Luciano, University of Auckland, New Zealand
Annachiara Mariani, University of Tennessee, United States
Alex Marlow-Mann, University of Kent, United Kingdom
Mariano Mestman, (CONICET) University of Buenos Aires, Argentina
Anna Miller-Klejsa, University of Lodz, Poland
Laura Rascaroli, University College Cork, Ireland
Susanna Scarparo, University of Sydney, Australia
Svetlana Sidorova, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia
Maria Bonaria Urban, Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome, Italy
Alessandra Vannucci, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Gaoheng Zhang, University of British Columbia, Canada
The year 2022 marks the 10th anniversary of the publication of the first issue of the Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies. Published by Intellect (UK) and co-sponsored by Wellesley College (USA), it remains the only English language journal on Italian cinema and media.
In the past ten years, we have been inclusive in our efforts to establish connections with scholars from several continents. We have also made it our mission to explore the resonance of Italian film in the world across times, themes, styles and genres. After publishing the first four issues— two on Italy and Asia (2:1 & 2:3, 2014), a third on Italy and Latin America (10:2, 2022), and the fourth one on Italy and post-socialist countries (2023), and organizing two international conferences (2027 & 2019), the Journal has created a large community of scholars of diverse disciplines, all engaged in studying the artistic intersections between Italy and other countries.
As we celebrate this anniversary, we are prepared to move forward with new explorations and discussions aimed at expanding these interconnected academic communities, with a focus on a broader understanding of Italian cinema and media in international artistic contexts.
The past decade has marked a series of successes for the Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies. This has coincided with a period during which the global media landscape has undergone remarkable transformations: from the Internet and World Wide Web to the rise of social networks and their deep impact on social interactions; from the ubiquitous smartphone emerging as the quintessential example of media convergence to the new conglomerates of a fast-changing panorama of platforms, devices and streaming services.
As media systems are always both driven by and the drivers of technological and social transformations, they are inextricable from new forms of everyday life, politics, society and culture, which scholarship must understand, analyse, and challenge.
With evolving media comes the development of new economies, production policies and distribution platforms, which match new and diverse formats, audiences, consumption patterns and modalities of interaction with the moving image. The relation of traditional cinema with evolving technologies, screen media, visual cultures and digital, social and interactive platforms has reconfigured what cinema means as production, consumption and prosumerism take shape under new landscapes of transmedia content and transnational audiences. From Netflix to YouTube and from Instagram to TikTok, cinematic and screen languages have accommodated the messages, interactions, arts and expressions of a changing world. This is a world dominated by an awareness of the urgency of climate, humanitarian, health and economic crises, along with the rise of movements for change and equality, including #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, which take on a global significance as well as cognizance of national- and region-specific approaches.
All of these changes have affected the ways we can and should look at cinema and media broadly speaking, but also how we can conceive of the cultural complexities of Italian histories and cultures and what challenges are faced by scholarship over the next years. Understanding Italian cinema and media cultures today means looking at how Italian cinema finds a place in the new media ecologies and economies at a national and transnational level as well as how YouTube, TikTok and social media have offered audiences new ways to narrate Italian cultures and specificities, how Italians communicate their diverse identities, and how these are shaped by new dynamics of inter-relation and distinction.
Looking at Italian cinema and media today thus also means understanding how the changing landscape of the cinema and media play an essential role in reframing Italian-ness in a changing national and global culture. New media have inherited the traditional forms in which our identities have been communicated, from our histories and the arts traditions on Instagram to YouTubers discussing our food cultures and Made in Italy design sensibilities. Social media have created new symbolic and relational bonds in the transnational web of connections and distinctions that tie Italians at home to those abroad. Media also have played and will play a key role in framing and re-framing the place of Italy in a postcolonial and decolonised perspective, offering visibility and providing points of access for non-white-centric ideas of Italian-ness, new subjectivities, and groups advocating for key issues such as migrants’ rights and an inclusive citizenship model for second-generation Italians.
As Italian media and cinema productions, agents, and audiences both national and transnational represent a lively and complex terrain of analysis, JICMS strives to capture and understand their complexities in all their newly-evolving forms.
As we reflect on the state of the disciplines (cinema and media studies), we open this CFP to a wide range of themes, with the intent of offering a unifying horizon that will allow scholars to explore diverse fields and topics in a broad international context and move forward with new studies, building the future of both the discipline and the journal.
With this CFP, the conference organizers invite proposals from scholars, independent researchers, cinema and media professionals, and graduate students for single papers, pre-constituted panels, and roundtables.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Post-cinema (intersectionality of cinema and social media)
- Social media (media ecologies, national branding, Facebook, Whatsapp)
- Cinema and media on demand: Amazon, Hulu, Netflix (from the theater to the home, watchers as content creators, multiplatform television, algorithms and taste)
- Non-theatrical cinema and media (industrial cinema and media, commercials, propaganda, didactic cinema and media)
- Immersive technologies (virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, spatial audio and artificial intelligence)
- Series (TV series, web series, pay TV, new frontiers in storytelling, transnational narratives, international circulation of TV series)
- Media, cultures, identity, politics, gender (mass vs. niche media, ‘Audience’ and practices of participation, representations of power, popular culture, feminism, (in)equities in access and digital divide, politics of media and media in politics, embodiment, multicultural media, identities from stars to selfies, mediation and remediation, ideologies, gender)
- Crime television (crime and crisis, restaging history, social change through popular crime media, challenging stereotypes and discrimination, transnational productions, transcultural formats)
- Popular genres and transnationalism (Western, Sci-Fi)
- Migrant stardom (e.g. Raffaella Carrà)
- Women in media industries (directors, writers, actors, transnational mobility)
- Writing in cinema (screenwriting, revising, translating, subtitling, adaptations)
- Reception (transnational, intermedial, critical, popular)
- Plurimediality and transmediality (cartoons, comics, graphic novels, fotoromanzi)
- Political cinema (reality, history, fiction)
- Archives and digital resources
- Cinema and the digital humanities
- Plurilingualism in cinema
- Landscape, environment, urban and rural in cinema
- Comedy and transnational reception
- Italian cinema and Latin American cinema
- Italian cinema and post-socialist cinemas
- Postcolonial Italian cinema
- Italian cinema in dialogue with other art/cultural trends (theatre, visual arts, literature)
- Italian cinema and the labor world/labor activities
- Form(s) in contemporary cinema
- Critical Posthumanism and Italian Cinema
- Housing and the home in Italian cinema and television
- Cinema schools in Italy (history, curricula, international students’ careers) (e.g. Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, other CSC schools).
The languages of the conference are English and Italian. Proposals for virtual papers will not be considered.
Please send an abstract of 250 words plus a short bio of 100 words for single papers, or 350 words for panels (including the aims of the panel and summaries of each contribution specifying the names of filmmakers, artists, films, media etc.) followed by individual titles, panelists’ bios, current academic affiliation, and emails for pre-constituted panels with 3 speakers, or roundtables in Italian or in English in a word.doc format, no pdf. We invite proposals for 20-minute presentations (inclusive of film clips). We welcome presentations using both conventional tools and video-essay commentaries.
Abstracts for consideration should be submitted to Flavia Laviosa at [email protected].
The deadline for the submission of abstracts is 5 January 2022. Notification of acceptance of abstracts will be sent out to authors by 15 January 2022.
Participants will receive a complimentary copy of JICMS and will be able to purchase Intellect publications at a special conference discounted price.
Conference registration fee includes: 2 lunches, opening and closing receptions.
The deadline for inclusion in the conference program is 15 March 2022. Please, make every effort to pay conference fees before this date.
€ 200 regular rate (€ 100 for 1 day)
€ 150 student rate (€ 75 for 1 day)
The registration fee will be paid to AUR and the website will be available in January 2022.
In case of withdrawals the registration fee will not be reimbursed.
In case of cancellation of the conference the registration fee will be reimbursed.
International students at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome: 1935 – 2020. A history to be written
Editor: Flavia Laviosa
Submission date: 30 June 2021
The Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome (CSC) was founded in 1935 with the intention of strengthening the national film industry and returning Italian cinema to its early role as world leader. This meant using cinema as ‘the most powerful weapon’, as Mussolini claimed. Despite its nationalistic mission, the CSC practiced an progressive admissions policy, accepting numerous international students, even though the modern concept of multicultural education was not part of fascist Italy. Since its opening, the CSC has admitted about 500 international students from six continents (Africa, Asia, Australasia, Europe, Latin America and North America) and approximately 100 countries, amounting to 13.16% of the total 3800 enrolled students.
Who were these students and why did they choose the CSC? Which international institutions promoted and facilitated their studies in Italy? Why were there students from Germany and Eastern Europe in the pre-WWII years and why so many from Greece, Arab nations, the United States and Latin America in the 1950s and 1960s? Alfredo Baldi provides some answers to these historical issues in his interview ‘Six continents at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome’ (JICMS 9:2, 2021 pp. 261-270).
Starting in 1947, both the CSC’s first post-war special commissioner, Umberto Barbaro, and his successor, Vice President Luigi Chiarini, intellectuals with a vast international culture, led the film school. Aware of the need to open the CSC to the world, they implemented recruitment policies geared towards increasing internationalization of its student body. The CSC’s new leadership valued diversity as a paramount creative contribution to the arts of filmmaking: their visionary admissions policy, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, aimed to welcome young talents of different ethnic origins, religions, ideological orientations and political affiliations.
Interest in the CSC in those years can be attributed both to the fascination with Italian neorealism and to the high reputation of the filmmakers who taught at the CSC, including Luigi Chiarini, Pietro Germi, Alessandro Blasetti and Luigi Zampa. To its multicultural, multiethnic and multilingual student population, the CSC offered innovative curricula integrating theory and practice in ten different specializations: Acting, Directing, Photography, Set Design, Costume Design, Screenwriting, Sound Production, Editing, Production and, since 1983, Film Animation. The CSC’s directors intended to launch a world-school that would furnish the grounds for fruitful intellectual exchanges, artistic collaborations and professional connections between Italian and international students while disseminating Italian cinematic styles that would consequently influence world cinema.
To this end, the article ‘International students at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome: 1935 – 2020. A history to be written’, co-authored by Flavia Laviosa (Wellesley College, USA), Alfredo Baldi (Comitato Scientifico Federazione Italiana dei Cineclub/FEDIC, Italy), Jim Carter (University of Michigan, USA), and Diego Bonelli (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand) includes a complete list of the CSC’s international alumni from 1935 to 2020 in Directing, Set Design and Photography (JICMS 9:2, 2021, pp. 175-209).
Drawn from archival and digital sources, the list allows scholars to study the work of these international students within a transnational framework and assess how their Italian training affected their artistry and professional craft. This type of research could broaden our understanding of whether and how the CSC’s Italian cinematic education impacted world cinema.
Link to the list of international students in Directing, Set Design and Photography: Click here to download
Within the transnational framework of Rome as the place where Italian cinematic education began and developed and the hypotheses on the CSC as a beacon of art and diversity, the intent of this CFP is manifold. First, we wish to rediscover and investigate the influence of Italian cinema education while unveiling unexplored trajectories across global film productions. Second, we wish to explore the cross-national dialogues and trans-generational exchanges that have taken place at the CSC since 1935, including their influences across global film productions. Finally, we intend to revisit this history from the perspectives of international artists themselves, through their accomplishments and by looking at what they might have contributed in giving back to Italy. Our goal is to recompose these intersections in a multi-directional, multi-modal and multi-layered set of interactive historical, geographical and artistic maps.
In sum, with this CFP we are committed to exploring the diffuse effects of the CSC educational polycentrism on the work of artists worldwide who studied at the CSC and who met with subsequent professional success. By researching the work of these artists, we aim to retrace threads that would bring their accomplishments full circle with the origin of their education at the CSC.
Contributions include, but are not limited to:
Proposals should be written in British English, should be entirely original and unpublished, and should not be under consideration by any other publisher.
Interviews, independent and experimental artist biographies, film and book reviews, conference and film festival reports are considered.
Proposals of English translations or edited versions of previously published works will not be considered.
Abstracts of articles should be sent to the editor Flavia Laviosa ([email protected]) by 30 June 2021, and should include the following information:
The accepted proposals will be notified by 15 July; completed articles should be sent by 15 January 2022. Authors will be notified of the results of the double-blind peer-review by 1 April 2022. Selected articles will be considered for publication in a special issue of JICMS.
Editor: Flavia Laviosa
Submission date: 30 June 2021
The Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome (CSC) was founded in 1935 with the intention of strengthening the national film industry and returning Italian cinema to its early role as world leader. This meant using cinema as ‘the most powerful weapon’, as Mussolini claimed. Despite its nationalistic mission, the CSC practiced an progressive admissions policy, accepting numerous international students, even though the modern concept of multicultural education was not part of fascist Italy. Since its opening, the CSC has admitted about 500 international students from six continents (Africa, Asia, Australasia, Europe, Latin America and North America) and approximately 100 countries, amounting to 13.16% of the total 3800 enrolled students.
Who were these students and why did they choose the CSC? Which international institutions promoted and facilitated their studies in Italy? Why were there students from Germany and Eastern Europe in the pre-WWII years and why so many from Greece, Arab nations, the United States and Latin America in the 1950s and 1960s? Alfredo Baldi provides some answers to these historical issues in his interview ‘Six continents at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome’ (JICMS 9:2, 2021 pp. 261-270).
Starting in 1947, both the CSC’s first post-war special commissioner, Umberto Barbaro, and his successor, Vice President Luigi Chiarini, intellectuals with a vast international culture, led the film school. Aware of the need to open the CSC to the world, they implemented recruitment policies geared towards increasing internationalization of its student body. The CSC’s new leadership valued diversity as a paramount creative contribution to the arts of filmmaking: their visionary admissions policy, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, aimed to welcome young talents of different ethnic origins, religions, ideological orientations and political affiliations.
Interest in the CSC in those years can be attributed both to the fascination with Italian neorealism and to the high reputation of the filmmakers who taught at the CSC, including Luigi Chiarini, Pietro Germi, Alessandro Blasetti and Luigi Zampa. To its multicultural, multiethnic and multilingual student population, the CSC offered innovative curricula integrating theory and practice in ten different specializations: Acting, Directing, Photography, Set Design, Costume Design, Screenwriting, Sound Production, Editing, Production and, since 1983, Film Animation. The CSC’s directors intended to launch a world-school that would furnish the grounds for fruitful intellectual exchanges, artistic collaborations and professional connections between Italian and international students while disseminating Italian cinematic styles that would consequently influence world cinema.
To this end, the article ‘International students at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome: 1935 – 2020. A history to be written’, co-authored by Flavia Laviosa (Wellesley College, USA), Alfredo Baldi (Comitato Scientifico Federazione Italiana dei Cineclub/FEDIC, Italy), Jim Carter (University of Michigan, USA), and Diego Bonelli (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand) includes a complete list of the CSC’s international alumni from 1935 to 2020 in Directing, Set Design and Photography (JICMS 9:2, 2021, pp. 175-209).
Drawn from archival and digital sources, the list allows scholars to study the work of these international students within a transnational framework and assess how their Italian training affected their artistry and professional craft. This type of research could broaden our understanding of whether and how the CSC’s Italian cinematic education impacted world cinema.
Link to the list of international students in Directing, Set Design and Photography: Click here to download
Within the transnational framework of Rome as the place where Italian cinematic education began and developed and the hypotheses on the CSC as a beacon of art and diversity, the intent of this CFP is manifold. First, we wish to rediscover and investigate the influence of Italian cinema education while unveiling unexplored trajectories across global film productions. Second, we wish to explore the cross-national dialogues and trans-generational exchanges that have taken place at the CSC since 1935, including their influences across global film productions. Finally, we intend to revisit this history from the perspectives of international artists themselves, through their accomplishments and by looking at what they might have contributed in giving back to Italy. Our goal is to recompose these intersections in a multi-directional, multi-modal and multi-layered set of interactive historical, geographical and artistic maps.
In sum, with this CFP we are committed to exploring the diffuse effects of the CSC educational polycentrism on the work of artists worldwide who studied at the CSC and who met with subsequent professional success. By researching the work of these artists, we aim to retrace threads that would bring their accomplishments full circle with the origin of their education at the CSC.
Contributions include, but are not limited to:
- theoretical and historical articles
- critical articles
- film and book reviews
- critical biographies of the artists
- interviews with the artists
- bio-filmographies
Proposals should be written in British English, should be entirely original and unpublished, and should not be under consideration by any other publisher.
Interviews, independent and experimental artist biographies, film and book reviews, conference and film festival reports are considered.
Proposals of English translations or edited versions of previously published works will not be considered.
Abstracts of articles should be sent to the editor Flavia Laviosa ([email protected]) by 30 June 2021, and should include the following information:
- 1) A 300-word abstract outlining:
- The topic
- Critical approach
- Theoretical and historical basis of the proposed article.
- The abstract should clearly state the goals of the article and provide a cohesive description of the objective of the argument. In addition to a 300-word abstract, authors should send:
- Relevant bibliography and filmography
- A 150-word biographical note followed by a detailed list of academic publications
The accepted proposals will be notified by 15 July; completed articles should be sent by 15 January 2022. Authors will be notified of the results of the double-blind peer-review by 1 April 2022. Selected articles will be considered for publication in a special issue of JICMS.
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Past and Present Intersections among Italian, Russian, Soviet and Post-Socialist Cinemas and Media
Co-Editors
Flavia Laviosa, Wellesley College
Anastasia Grusha, Lomonosov Moscow State University
Proposal submission by 31 May 2021
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 cinema and 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.
The purpose of this themed issue of the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies (JICMS) is to explore the encounter between artistic geographies and academic geometries delineated by the role that Italian cinema plays and has played in Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Russia and various post-Soviet states (like the Central Asia countries, the Baltic states, the Caucasus,
etc.) and East Germany, during and after the Soviet period, as well as in cooperation opportunities between the film industries of these countries.
This is a largely under-researched area of studies and with this CFP, the JICMS attempts to fill in such an academic void.
Topics include, but are not limited to:
Proposals should be written in British English, should be entirely original and unpublished, and should not be under consideration by any other publisher.
Interviews, independent and experimental artist biographies, film and book reviews, conference and film festival reports are considered.
Proposals of English translations or edited versions of previously published works will not be considered.
Abstracts should be sent to the co-editors Flavia Laviosa ([email protected]) and Anastasia Grusha ([email protected]) by 31 May 2021, and should include the following information:
The abstract should clearly state the goals of the article and provide a cohesive description of the objective of the argument. In addition to a 500-word abstract, authors should send:
The accepted proposals will be notified by 15 June; completed articles should be sent by 30 September. Authors will be notified of the results of the double-blind peer-review by 30 November 2021.
Dr. Flavia Laviosa is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Italian Studies and in the Cinema and Media Studies Program, Wellesley College, United States. She is the founder and Editor in-Chief of the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies (Intellect), and of the book series Trajectories of Italian Cinema and Media Studies (Intellect and Chicago UP).
Dr. Anastasia Grusha is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Journalism, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia. She is also Chair of the Communication in Post- and Neo-Authoritarian Societies Working Group of the IAMCR.
Co-Editors
Flavia Laviosa, Wellesley College
Anastasia Grusha, Lomonosov Moscow State University
Proposal submission by 31 May 2021
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 cinema and 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.
The purpose of this themed issue of the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies (JICMS) is to explore the encounter between artistic geographies and academic geometries delineated by the role that Italian cinema plays and has played in Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Russia and various post-Soviet states (like the Central Asia countries, the Baltic states, the Caucasus,
etc.) and East Germany, during and after the Soviet period, as well as in cooperation opportunities between the film industries of these countries.
This is a largely under-researched area of studies and with this CFP, the JICMS attempts to fill in such an academic void.
Topics include, but are not limited to:
- Global Neorealisms: dialogues among Italy, Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Russia and various post-Soviet states (like the Central Asia countries, the Baltic states, the Caucasus, etc.) and East Germany.
- Reception of neorealist films in Soviet and post-socialist countries.
- Links between Italian political cinema and media in these regions.
- Italian popular genres in these geographical areas: commedia all’italiana, television shows and series.
- The reception of Italian cinema and media in this vast geographical region and vice versa.
- Transnational stardom in cinema and television.
- Transnational co-productions and the adaptation to the needs of the respective national markets of film and television productions.
- Italian film festivals in the aforementioned states.
- Soviet-Italian film institutional exchanges.
- Geopolitics in Italian cinema and media in these countries.
- Soviet-Italian co-productions.
- Representations of Italy in Russian media.
- Study of institutional powers like Rai, Mediaset, Sky and variously affiliated production/distribution companies that embody and entertain strong relationships with domestic and international power centers.
Proposals should be written in British English, should be entirely original and unpublished, and should not be under consideration by any other publisher.
Interviews, independent and experimental artist biographies, film and book reviews, conference and film festival reports are considered.
Proposals of English translations or edited versions of previously published works will not be considered.
Abstracts should be sent to the co-editors Flavia Laviosa ([email protected]) and Anastasia Grusha ([email protected]) by 31 May 2021, and should include the following information:
- A 500-word abstract outlining:
- The topic
- Critical approach
- Theoretical and historical basis of the proposed article.
The abstract should clearly state the goals of the article and provide a cohesive description of the objective of the argument. In addition to a 500-word abstract, authors should send:
- Relevant bibliography and filmography
- A 200-word biographical note followed by a detailed list of academic publications
The accepted proposals will be notified by 15 June; completed articles should be sent by 30 September. Authors will be notified of the results of the double-blind peer-review by 30 November 2021.
Dr. Flavia Laviosa is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Italian Studies and in the Cinema and Media Studies Program, Wellesley College, United States. She is the founder and Editor in-Chief of the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies (Intellect), and of the book series Trajectories of Italian Cinema and Media Studies (Intellect and Chicago UP).
Dr. Anastasia Grusha is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Journalism, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia. She is also Chair of the Communication in Post- and Neo-Authoritarian Societies Working Group of the IAMCR.