Film & Media Studies

This course examines and unpicks the memory of Fascism and the Holocaust from the Italian perspective. Through a combination of class lectures and discussions, film screenings and readings, and site visits, students connect decisions taken in Fascist Italy with the end result of forced labor and mechanized killing that occurred principally outside of the country’s borders. The course explores pre-Fascist and Fascist Italy’s relationship with its Jewish population, the repressive nature of the dictatorship, its involvement in the Second World War, and its alliance with Nazi Germany to gain a thorough grounding how scholars have sought to explain Italy’s Holocaust. Having established the history of the Jews in Italy and the processes and practicalities by which they were rounded-up and deported from occupied Italy, the course reflects upon debates surrounding guilt and how this has been used to excuse or deflect responsibility for the deportation and murder of religious and political prisoners. The memory, or otherwise, of the Holocaust in Italy has been heavily influenced by domestic identities, politics, and culture and the course examines this through film. As arguably the most important artistic medium of modernity, cinema allows one to construct and deconstruct many myths and identities. This course analyzes some of the most relevant Italian film productions relating to the memory of Fascism and the Holocaust in Italy, primarily as socio-historical documents. Instruction consists of a series of lectures and class debates around assigned readings and film analysis.

This course examines major nineteenth-and-twentieth centuries European novels in English and their adaptations in the in the countries of their origin and other countries. Students will read and discuss great novels written by major European writers and the way in which they have been put into films by contemporary film directors in the respective countries.

This course analyzes the historical evolution of film, television and video. Topics covered include: silent cinema Golden age; from the studio system to the new Hollywood; neorealism and the crisis of the classical language; the new waves; world cinema; avant-garde cinema; documentary and film; technology and aesthetics; animation in film and tv; television in the United States, Europe, and other countries.

This course examines the world's most powerful film industry. It produces a historical and conceptual map of the institution that dominated the global film industry in the twentieth century, and which continues to do so today. In focusing on cinema as a socio-cultural and economic force, both in the United States and across the globe, it examines how Hollywood has historically produced and distributed a powerful cultural imaginary and devised methods to encourage audiences to consume it. The course considers Hollywood as an early example of a genuinely global industry that initially sustained itself through the implementation of a range of industrial, economic, cultural, legal, quasi-legal, and indeed illegal conventions and practices, i.e., the star system, the production code, the studio system, the genre system, monopolistic practices like vertical integration, and the Classical Hollywood style of film-making.

This course analyzes the "Hollywood" system of move making and its strict adherence to genre films during its golden age. Additionally, it studies multiple film genres, their repeated formulae, and their global reception through reviews and economic trends.  Along with film viewings, coursework includes theoretical texts and primary source documents.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program and is intended for advanced level students only. Enrolment is by consent of the instructor. The course focuses on how a conflict as an “event,” along with its representations, is a semiotic and cultural phenomenon. In other words, it is also a conflict on the significance to be attributed to events and to the actors participating in it as, for example, when mediated discourse labels or sanctions one of the concerned parties as “the barbarian,” “the oppressed,” or “the oppressor,” “the victim,” or “the perpetrator,” “the bystander," and “the implicated subject,” thus influencing the effects and the affects that international public opinion lives and feels in confronting and interpreting the conflict itself. The course focuses on how conflicts – their regulation, repression, and particularly their visual representations – constitute privileged loci for a semiotic analysis, arguing how conflicts challenge and rearrange pre-existing systems of cultural control, not only in the first explosive moments of violence or spontaneous civil disobedience, but also, subsequently, when they encounter modes of historicization linked closely to unifying discourses of national identity. Focus is given to the relationship between still and moving images (photograph, cinema) and conflict; on how and to what extent images and icons inspired by the examination of issues of memory and oblivion experienced in the last century respond to the challenges imposed by 21st-century conflicts.

This course explores the interconnectivity between the rapid evolution of media outlets and content, the contemporary “banalization” of terrorist and other types of violence, and their fallout over issues related to social justice in France and Europe. The course examines some recent forms of social confrontation and the way these confrontations are channeled on a grand scale through mass media, both old and new. Students interrogate the political, economic, cultural, and psychological implications, as well as the “spectatorship component,” related to the growing, constant sharing of violence over public platforms, and political agendas. Different cases of social controversies are studied and compared as we probe their relevance to some larger, technological, and globalized frames of analysis. The course examines the adjustments political institutions, social bodies, and media actors have practiced when faced with these forms of protest in moments of crisis. The course attempts to understand how, and to what extent, all these altered notions have impacted national, sectorial, and class-oriented identities.