Cinergie – Il Cinema e le altre Arti: Announcements
type: channel
description: Cinergie – ISSN 2280-9481 is an open-access, peer-reviewed, class-A journal. Its first on-line issue first appeared in 2012, but the journal has been published in hard copy since 1999. Cinergie is a wide-ranging film journal, that aims to publish original articles about national and international cinema, building a bridge to related fields.
language: en-US
items: Visualizing Jihad: Western Representations of Jihadism in Cinema and Visual Culture (1989-2019)
items: The Mickey Mouse Paradigm: Aesthetics, Cultures, and Industries in the Disney Universe
items: When We Were Digital: Critical Archaeology of the First Digital Turn
items: Tele-Archives. Reframing Archival Research on Local Televisions Across Europe
items: The ‘Spectral Turn’ in Film and Media. Technology, Images, Identities and Aesthetics in between Presence and Absence
items: Cinephemera. Ephemeral materials for the study of Italian cinema between the 1930s and 1960s

Visualizing Jihad: Western Representations of Jihadism in Cinema and Visual Culture (1989-2019)
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description: Edited by Alessandra Goggio (University of Bergamo) and Giuseppe Previtali (University of Bergamo) From the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 to the death of the Islamic State's self-proclaimed caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in 2019, jihadism occupied a central and often obsessive place in global geopolitics and the Western imagination. Over the course of these three decades, the figure of the jihadist has become one of the most recurring and recognizable representations of otherness, danger, and political violence in visual and media products. Long before and after 9/11, cinema, television, comics, graphic novels, video games, photography, digital media, and contemporary art have shaped, circulated, and transformed representations of jihadism in various cultural contexts. As a complex cultural phenomenon, jihadism has generated an extensive body of interdisciplinary scholarship, including work from political scientists, security studies experts, historians, and cultural and media scholars. Similarly, scholars of film and visual culture have produced significant analyses of how jihadism and the War on Terror have been represented in cinema, television, digital media, and popular culture. This body of works often highlight the political significance of these representations. However, most of these analyses focus on specific events, media texts, or historical moments, particularly those surrounding 9/11 and IS's rise to prominence in 2014. Conversely, relatively little attention has been devoted to understanding these representations within a longer historical trajectory. Adopting a diachronic and transmedial perspective, this special issue investigates how Western visual cultures have reimagined jihadism over three decades. This investigation reveals recurring tropes, narrative frameworks, and figures of alterity that shape public understanding of political violence, religion, and global conflict. Rather than focusing exclusively on the post-9/11 period, this…
creator: Cinergie – Il Cinema e le altre Arti
date: 2026-06-11

The Mickey Mouse Paradigm: Aesthetics, Cultures, and Industries in the Disney Universe
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description: Over the past century, The Walt Disney Company has established itself as one of the most influential and prolific players in the global film and media landscape. Founded as an animation studio, it consolidated its position throughout the twentieth century, evolving into a multinational conglomerate capable of diversifying its activities across a wide range of sectors. Today, Disney stands not only as one of the most globally recognisable media brands, but also as one of the most complex and multifaceted media corporations. Parallel to this industrial expansion, scholarly engagement with the Disney universe—defined as the ensemble of narratives, languages, cultural practices, and production configurations under or around the Disney brand—has developed in increasingly nuanced ways. From early critical reflections (Schickel 1968; Finch 1973; Ejzenstejn 1984), academic interest has steadily grown, culminating in the consolidation of Disney Studies as a productive, distinctly multidisciplinary field of research. In recent decades, scholarship on Disney has largely foregrounded its aesthetic and creative dimensions. Alongside well-established approaches centred on cinema—particularly animation (Furniss 2009; Pallant 2013)—a substantial body of work has broadened the field to encompass television, video games, and Disney’s intersections with music, theatre, and fashion (Johnson 2011; Bell 2020; Madej, Lee 2020). At the same time, Disney has been examined as a social and cultural phenomenon, most notably through the lens of “Disneyfication” (Bryman 2004), as well as in relation to the production and circulation of ideological discourses and moral norms (Byrne, McQuillan 2000; Ward 2002). These analyses frequently engage with questions of national identity, gender, ethnicity, class, and the construction of otherness (Wells 2002; Brode 2006; Cheu 2013). Moreover, growing attention has been directed towards Disney’s industrial strategies and economic practices, including its r…
creator: Cinergie – Il Cinema e le altre Arti
date: 2026-04-16

When We Were Digital: Critical Archaeology of the First Digital Turn
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description: The forceful spread in recent years of an “Algorithmic regime” (Uricchio 2020) in almost every aspect of our daily lives has sparked a lively debate, often marked by alarmist and nostalgic positions, but also by a certain eagerness to label new “turns,” provide definitions, and predict future scenarios. Yet beneath the “futuristic” veneer of terminology and scenarios, the most common arguments used to describe this supposed “Second Digital Turn” (Carpo 2017) are, upon closer inspection (Langdon Winner 1977), the same arguments that accompanied the social, cultural, psychological, and emotional processing of all the major twentieth-century shifts in scientific knowledge and technological development—especially when driven by more or less intelligent forms of automation of the “machine.” And as in the past, today too the fields of visual and audiovisual creation and production, as well as the social and cultural dynamics of our relationship with images, are particularly apt to bear witness to change in especially eloquent ways. This special issue arises, in some respects, as a “reaction” against the discursive practices that daily surround the presence, uses, and products of “artificial intelligence” (an extremely ambiguous term which, as Hito Steyerl suggests, should rather be replaced with the phrase “machine learning-based tools,” 2025). It reacts in particular by proposing a return to the first Digital Turn—the one that, in the early 1990s, globally marked a radical change of paradigm—not simply to distinguish between forms of continuity or rupture, fragmentation or reorganization (or to question the very hypothesis of a first and a second turn), but rather to recover and reread, in all its complexity, the debate triggered by that crucial transition. We are convinced that this debate may prove valuable in helping us better focus on the present, enrich our understanding of the key issues that shape it, and avoid overestimating what is new. After all, just as the di…
creator: Cinergie – Il Cinema e le altre Arti
date: 2026-02-27

Tele-Archives. Reframing Archival Research on Local Televisions Across Europe
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description: This special issue of «Cinergie» − developed within the scope of the PRIN 2020 research project ATLas - Atlante delle Televisioni Locali (Atlas of Local Televisions) − intends to bring together a wide variety of contributions on local broadcasting in Europe, with a particular focus on the several ways in which archival research can delve into the evolution of media systems in different contexts, as well as investigate unexplored narratives in European television history. The existing literature has largely relied on memorialist accounts to assess the peculiarities of local TV stations. A thorough and systemic historical inquiry of Europe’s commercial broadcasting is however still lacking. The CFP consequently solicits contributions addressing the many single stories of local broadcasters in relation to more general interpretations of the progressive commercialization of European television. Italy provides an interesting case study to address the evolution undertaken during the 1980s by European televisions, but it also shows the need for a transnational and/or comparative analysis. Between 1974 and 1976, a series of rulings issued by the National Constitutional Court brought about a revolution in the country’s television landscape. Together with the 1975 reform of national PSB Rai, the Court provisions opened a new era in the history of Italian broadcasting, ending State’s monopoly and leading the way towards the growth of Italian local and private televisions. The ensuing commercialisation of Italian broadcasting was however connected to and sustained by larger historical transformations which cannot be confined within the nation’s geographical or political borders: technological innovations in broadcasting, increased market liberalisation, progressive segmentation of consumer habits all contributed to transnationally challenge the hitherto dominant European television paradigm, prompting a greater influence of American commercial television models and programs, as…
creator: Cinergie – Il Cinema e le altre Arti
date: 2024-11-03

The ‘Spectral Turn’ in Film and Media. Technology, Images, Identities and Aesthetics in between Presence and Absence
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description: The concept of spectrality has spread in a cross-disciplinary manner following the consolidation of the term ‘spectral turn’ (Blanco and Peeren 2013), courtesy of Derrida's (1994; Derrida and Stiegler 2002) notion of hauntology, subsequently reworked by Simon Reynolds (2011) and Mark Fisher (2014). A spectral perspective has cut across deconstructionist thought, media and film theories, cultural history and queer and postcolonial studies. Roger Luckhurst's (2002) seminal contributions on telepathy in late 19th century science, culture and literature, Terry Castle's (1995) investigations into the invention of the uncanny in post-Enlightenment culture, and Jeffrey Sconce's (2000) analyses of the “electronic liveness” of communication technology, have highlighted the mediumistic dimension of the media, highlighting the pledge to connect the world of the living with that of the dead. These studies attribute a supernatural, magical and occult dimension to the media inventions of the 18th and 19th centuries. The communicative and visual functions of the media are juxtaposed with extra-ordinary uses and a symbolic construction that interacts with everything that appears as liminal. For instance, photography and the wireless telegraph experienced a kind of splitting apart through the spread of “spirit photography” (Gunning 2007, 99), which posed ghosts, phantoms and ectoplasm alongside the actual people portrayed, and the “spiritual telegraph’” (Sconce 2000, 12), which aimed to connect the living with the dead, the worldly with the otherworldly. The study of spectrality is not limited to the analysis of representations of supernatural entities and the deconstruction of their recurrence in media texts. The evocation of spectral figures makes it possible to reflect on issues relating to the construction of identity, the processing of trauma and the creation of a collective memory. Through the reworking of the phantom as a conceptual metaphor, spectrality is expressed as a par…
creator: Cinergie – Il Cinema e le altre Arti
date: 2024-07-31

Cinephemera. Ephemeral materials for the study of Italian cinema between the 1930s and 1960s
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description: This special issue of «Cinergie» - developed in the context of the research PRIN project Cinephemera. Ephemeral materials for the study of Italian cinema between the 1930s and 1960s - aims to investigate “cinephemera” in the history of Italian cinema during the period of its prime role in the media system and consumer habits (1936–1966), and use them to cast light on unexplored regions fields? of Italian film. The study of the ephemera can aim to rebuild the everyday film experience in terms of memories, materials and mediation processes. They are all objects of transitory nature, which is linked to forms of use on a specific occasion (Makepeace 1985, 10). They mediate, build and extend a constant dialogue between public and industry (Moore 2016, 316) and contain precious evidence of past culture (Wickham 2010). More in detail, we understand cinephemera as a category that includes manufactured objects and collectible items (trading cards, cigarette cards, postcards, envelopes, stamps, pocket calendars, gadgets and other movie-inspired, mass-produced objects); artefacts spontaneously produced by cinema fans (personal and appointment diaries, albums, “schedari” (spectator film files), scrapbooks and other movie-inspired private paper items); and correspondence from admirers and spectators (letters sent to Italian or international stars and columns devoted to reader-spectator correspondence in popular periodicals and in the sector press), all intended as elements mediating the spectator experience and as sources for the social history of “moviegoing” (Wickham 2010; Moore 2016). Thanks to these collectible items and spontaneous artefacts, the moviegoing experience can be rebuilt using senses other than just sight (Casetti 2001), including touch and indeed the whole body. Personal and appointment diaries or objects from a cinema visit kept as a memory act as “portable” records and archives, private memorabilia, “mnestic protheses” (Caneppele 2018) and extensions of the m…
creator: Cinergie – Il Cinema e le altre Arti
date: 2023-12-20