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: 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
items: Crime Unmasked: Exploring the Morphologies of Italian Giallo through Transnational Influences and Intermedial Hybridization
items: Call for Papers - Repositioning Film Criticism. Critical Displacements among the Film Critics from 1930 to 1970: Space, Connections, Movements

When We Were Digital: Critical Archaeology of the First Digital Turn
type: item
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
type: item
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
type: item
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
type: item
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

Crime Unmasked: Exploring the Morphologies of Italian Giallo through Transnational Influences and Intermedial Hybridization
type: item
description: If a lively intermedial dialogue emerges between the two world wars in Italy, pushing the Giallo beyond the boundaries of literature (Mazzei and Valentini, 2017; Curti 2022), it is after the end of the Second World War, and especially with the advent of television, that the crime genre (Calabrese and Rossi, 2018; Pieri 2011; Priestman 2009; Knight 2004) branches out into popular culture, exploding in a multitude of forms, productions, atmospheres, styles, and characters. The representations of crime within the transmedia macro-genre of the Giallo have thus accompanied and interpreted some fundamental cultural and social transformations in Italy, from the 1950s to the present. The polarity between detection and the criminal act – the core of the Giallo – expresses, on the one hand, the morphological complexity of the genre, its permeability to both indigenous and international narrative models and archetypes, and on the other hand, it serves as an amplifier of social anxieties regarding criminal phenomena in contemporary liberal democracies (Biressi 2001) and the tensions and desires of Western societies (Perissinotto 2008). In this respect, the Giallo becomes a heuristic device capable of capturing and deciphering the symptoms of an ongoing socio-cultural change, as well as revealing the traumatic signs of past historical events (Pezzotti 2014) or the traces of the evolution of criminal law theories and practices, especially in the oscillations between the inquisitorial and the accusatory models (Amodio 2016). At the narrative level, these models are often reflected in the development and hybridization of two different narrative paradigms: detective fiction and procedural drama. Equally significant from a cultural perspective is Giallo's ability to intersect and reinterpret the paradigms of femininity and masculinity within specific historical periods. It accomplishes this through the use of plots and visual strategies that problematize the relationship between soci…
creator: Cinergie – Il Cinema e le altre Arti
date: 2023-06-29

Call for Papers - Repositioning Film Criticism. Critical Displacements among the Film Critics from 1930 to 1970: Space, Connections, Movements
type: item
description: The numerous and recurring cycles of institutionalization that film criticism has undergone throughout the decades have never fully disciplined this professional field, which is instead marked by a fruitful lack of specialization and uniformity. The history of film criticism therefore consists less of intellectual positions achieved once and for all than of cultural operators constantly moving across geographical space (for example along the center/periphery, or city/province axes, defined by the biographical experience of many cinephiles and film critics), across political, educational and military institutions (that are often the professional destinations of critics), across different media system (with connections between publishing industry, radio, tv, and digital media) and national as well as cultural contexts. Film criticism creates both occasional and enduring connections by means of ritual moments (such as film festivals and heated controversies in the press) that redefine the geography of cultural production. Criticism is also the gateway to the world of intellectual production for traditionally marginalized and underrepresented subjects for reasons related to gender, class, ideology, race and religion, that is the practice that allows such intellectuals to enter well-established and respected professional environments In accordance with the related research project “A private history of Italian film criticism 1930-1970” (funded by the Italian Ministry of Research), the purpose of this monographic issue is to invite articles that question film criticism as a relational system and as a practice generating physical and symbolic repositioning, displacements, and transgressions. The main focus is on Italian film criticism, although proposals shedding light on other national contexts are more than welcome. Proposals revolving around written and non-written sources related to the work of film critics (such as correspondence, recordings, photographs, editorial ma…
creator: Cinergie – Il Cinema e le altre Arti
date: 2022-10-06