Roberto Cavallini
Roberto Cavallini is a film and visual cultures scholar and film producer based in Trento (Italy).
After studying Art History and Aesthetics at Cà Foscari University of Venice, Roberto was awarded a PhD in Visual Culture in 2010 from Goldsmiths, University of London. Roberto has taught in the Visual Culture Department at Goldsmiths and in the Art Histories Department at the City and Guilds of London Art School. Between 2012 and 2016, Roberto was Assistant Professor in the Radio, TV and Cinema Department, Faculty of Communication at Yaşar University, Izmir (Turkey) where he taught Visual Culture, Documentary Cinema and Auteur Cinema and supervised the practical labs of Documentary Practices and Short Film.
Roberto's research and teaching interests include Italian and European Cinema, documentary cinema and the essay film, World Cinema and visual cultures, the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini, temporality and cultural memory in art and film. He is part of the editorial board of ‘Italian Frame’, a new book series published by Mimesis International for which he curated an anthology which traces the relationship between post-war Italian Cinema and religion (“Requiem for a Nation: religion and politics in post-war Italian Cinema”, Mimesis International, 2016).
Beside his academic activities, since 2006 Roberto has worked as author and producer for different film and cultural projects in Italy, England, Morocco, Turkey, Syria and India.
He founded Altrove Films in 2016 and he produced several award-winning short films and documentaries, presented at FIDMarseille, Festival dei Popoli, IFF Rotterdam, Perugia Social Film Festival, Festival de Cine de Bogotà, Biografilm Festival.
He has been nominated and selected as one of the Emerging European Producers 2020, representing Italy at Jihlava IDFF and Berlinale.
Since may 2019, he works as Producer and distribution manager at Albolina Film (Bolzano).
Roberto is currently Associate Professor in Cinema studies and practices at LABA Trentino and Adjunct Professor in History of Italian Cinema at Boston University (Study Abroad Programs in Padua, Italy).
After studying Art History and Aesthetics at Cà Foscari University of Venice, Roberto was awarded a PhD in Visual Culture in 2010 from Goldsmiths, University of London. Roberto has taught in the Visual Culture Department at Goldsmiths and in the Art Histories Department at the City and Guilds of London Art School. Between 2012 and 2016, Roberto was Assistant Professor in the Radio, TV and Cinema Department, Faculty of Communication at Yaşar University, Izmir (Turkey) where he taught Visual Culture, Documentary Cinema and Auteur Cinema and supervised the practical labs of Documentary Practices and Short Film.
Roberto's research and teaching interests include Italian and European Cinema, documentary cinema and the essay film, World Cinema and visual cultures, the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini, temporality and cultural memory in art and film. He is part of the editorial board of ‘Italian Frame’, a new book series published by Mimesis International for which he curated an anthology which traces the relationship between post-war Italian Cinema and religion (“Requiem for a Nation: religion and politics in post-war Italian Cinema”, Mimesis International, 2016).
Beside his academic activities, since 2006 Roberto has worked as author and producer for different film and cultural projects in Italy, England, Morocco, Turkey, Syria and India.
He founded Altrove Films in 2016 and he produced several award-winning short films and documentaries, presented at FIDMarseille, Festival dei Popoli, IFF Rotterdam, Perugia Social Film Festival, Festival de Cine de Bogotà, Biografilm Festival.
He has been nominated and selected as one of the Emerging European Producers 2020, representing Italy at Jihlava IDFF and Berlinale.
Since may 2019, he works as Producer and distribution manager at Albolina Film (Bolzano).
Roberto is currently Associate Professor in Cinema studies and practices at LABA Trentino and Adjunct Professor in History of Italian Cinema at Boston University (Study Abroad Programs in Padua, Italy).
less
InterestsView All (35)
Uploads
Contributors: Roberto Cavallini, Roberto Chiesi, Silvia Dibeltulo, Juan Juvé, Fernando Pagnoni, Laura Rascaroli, Daniele Rugo, Tomaso Subini, Daniela Treveri Gennari, Fabio Vighi.
I will look in particular at three films belonging to three different film genres, released few years before Aguirre: the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972) and directed by three Italian directors: the thriller/psychological drama "A doppia faccia" (‘Double face’, Riccardo Freda, 1969), the gothic horror/nocturnal spaghetti western "E Dio disse a Caino" (‘And God said to Cain’, Antonio Margheriti, 1970), one of the forty movies included in the Spaghetti Western retrospective screened during the 64th Mostra Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica Venezia in 2007, and the euro sleaze soft-core giallo "La bestia uccide a sangue freddo" (aka Slaughter Hotel, or Asylum Erotica, Fernando Di Leo, 1971). In these films, which belong to the lower forms of Italian Popular Cinema and are directed by three directors who have a consistent directing style, Kinski plays very different roles: a millionaire husband, a man in search of revenge and a psychiatrist. All three roles are somehow positive roles and present Kinski in different acting dimensions which will allow me to inspect his adaptability to every story he played in. Moreover, the discussion about these movies and Kinski’s performances will be contextualized in relation to the recent debate concerning bad cinema and b-movies and their status in film criticism and film studies. Finally, the aim of this chapter is to trace Kinski’s stylization method and how he was reframed and re-coded by Herzog’s intervention, showing his trajectory without solution of continuity from bad cinema to Herzog’s films.
Liverpool (2008), Argentinean director Lisandro Alonso employs a
distinctive narrative motif, namely the journey of the solitary individual
through desolated landscapes in rural Argentina. From a
comparative point of view, the key to understanding these introverted
trajectories is to consider Alonso’s construction of narrative space
around the misery of a stark void, namely the absence of home. For
Alonso, home is not a peaceful destination, connoting the intimacy
of a family, serenity or simply a place where one is allowed to dream
in peace (Bachelard 1994, 6). The absence of home becomes the
blind spot of these journeys: home turns out to be a broken horizon.
In this essay I will mainly focus on the film Los Muertos and the way
in which it radicalizes narrative space through the combination of
cinematic silence (absence of words and dialogues) and cinematic
slowness (the use of long-takes), while formulating a void which coincides
with the protagonist’s homelessness. Moreover, positioning
my effort within the growing field of slow cinema studies, this essay
considers how Alonso’s radical cinematic realism problematizes the
concept of authenticity in its aesthetic and political dimensions.
I would argue that Antonioni’s early films in general and L’amorosa menzogna in particular, which is constructed in a style based on an extremely refined mise-en-scene, points precisely towards an understanding of (documentary) cinema as “the labour of fiction”, borrowing an expression from Jacques Rancière’s work which will be developed further throughout the essay."
The book was an outcome of the one-year artistic research project 'On Dissent: a collective narrative', conceived and developed by Roberto Cavallini, Carla Esperanza Tommasini and Tuna Yilmaz with the support of EU-Turkey Tandem, a cultural exchange programme by the European Cultural Foundation and Stiftung Mercator, in collaboration with MitOst, Anadolu Kultur and Bilgi University.
The book was published with the support of European Cultural Foundation and Stiftung Mercator and it has been presented in Istanbul (Depo Art Space), Berlin and Trento."
Mosso da questa constatazione – che attraversa il cinema per arrivare al discorso filosofico – il contributo qui offerto tenta di fare luce sulla serieta’ del melodramma, o meglio sul ‘serio melodrammatico’. Esporre il serio al melodrammatico, cio’ che in alcune istanze sfugge ad una semplice caratterizzazione di genere, significa prima di tutto prendere sul serio il genere di per se’ e quindi cominciare ad allentare le sue possibilita’ facendo emergere qualcosa. Significa inoltre rendere giustizia ad una serie di opere il cui contributo va ben al di la’ della risistemazione di un’ipotetica tassanomia cinematografica, imponendo una riflessione sulle possibilita’ stesse del cinema.
Annotato l’intento quindi, il procedimento si e’ incentrato sulla possibilita’ di articolare le passioni considerate piu’ trite del melodramma in modo da mobilitare non cio’ che questi films nascondono, ma cio’ che deve la propria marginalita’ all’evidenza.
L’ovvio del melodrammatico, cio’ che viene subito esposto –passioni inconciliabili con la realta’ esterna –mette in moto un discorso ‘serio’ sull’esaustione del soggetto. Il melodramma, almeno alcuni casi illuminanti, esprime l’insopportabile tensione di una vita senza vergogna.
Il primo contributo di questo volume si concentra in particolare su di uno spostamento decisivo che avviene nel momento in cui il melodramma si sposta (uno spostamento di ritorno) da Hollywood all’Europa. Il confronto in particolare e’ facilitato dall’analisi ravvicinata di un lavoro di Vincent Minnelli e uno del regista tedesco Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
La lettura dell’opera di Chabrol ‘Les Biches’ si pone in quest’ottica come problematica pietra di paragone. Il saggio che vi e’ qui dedicato infatti non ne affronta semplicemente l’emblematicita’, ma la spinge ad un momento di rottura, il momento cioe’ in cui il rapporto erotico come rapporto di possesso sfigura di fronte alla propria promessa.
A concludere il lavoro, l’intervista a Juliane Lorenz, montatrice degli ultimi film di Fassbinder – nonche’ ex-moglie e presidentessa della fondazione intitolata al regista Tedesco – offre alcuni spunti inediti circa lavori non ultimati e ambizioni insoddisfatte del grande autore capace in poco piu’ che quindici anni di carriera di produrre una quarantina di films.
Lo spezzone di sceneggiatura allegato in chiusura – tratto da un lavoro in corso di Daniele Rugo – oltre che come tributo a RWF, intende riaprire idealmente le questioni trattate verso le possibilita’ attuali del melodrammatico.
Damascus: Tourists, Artists, Secret Agents is a pseudo-fictitious encounter of artists, dancers, secret agents, speculative writers, lovers, film-makers and photographers who come together to unravel the rumors, questions and traces of the mysterious disappearances that happen in the subconscious urban setting of one of the world's oldest cities.
The idiosyncratic novel is the outcome of a Reloading Images collaboration and an ongoing platform for artistic research, involving more than thirty international artists and writers. 'Reloading Images: Damascus / Work in Progress 2008' is a playground for discursive practices on artistic agency that happened in relation to Damascus, the actual city, and that of our imagination.
Edited by Kaya Behkalam, Paula Bugni, Beatrice Catanzaro, Roberto Cavallini, Azin Feizabadi, Carla Esperanza Tommasini, Sarah Rifky, Ashkan Sepahvand / Reloading Images
With contributions by Salina Abaza, Jan Ackenhausen, Woroud Ahdali, Isa Andreu, Kaya Behkalam, Omar Berakdar, Paula Bugni, Beatrice Catanzaro, Roberto Cavallini, Mikala Hyldig Dal, Azin Feizabadi, Soudade Kaadan, Sophia Krey-Kolios, Gabriel Martinez, Gabriella Micale, Sanna Miericke, Raqs Media Collective, Rania Mleihi, Ersan Ocak, Juergen Rendl, Sarah Rifky, Adel Samara, Manuela Scebba, Ashkan Sepahvand, Carla Esperanza Tommasini, Hanadi Traifeh, Kianoosh Vahabi and Wu Ming 4
Contributors: Roberto Cavallini, Roberto Chiesi, Silvia Dibeltulo, Juan Juvé, Fernando Pagnoni, Laura Rascaroli, Daniele Rugo, Tomaso Subini, Daniela Treveri Gennari, Fabio Vighi.
I will look in particular at three films belonging to three different film genres, released few years before Aguirre: the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972) and directed by three Italian directors: the thriller/psychological drama "A doppia faccia" (‘Double face’, Riccardo Freda, 1969), the gothic horror/nocturnal spaghetti western "E Dio disse a Caino" (‘And God said to Cain’, Antonio Margheriti, 1970), one of the forty movies included in the Spaghetti Western retrospective screened during the 64th Mostra Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica Venezia in 2007, and the euro sleaze soft-core giallo "La bestia uccide a sangue freddo" (aka Slaughter Hotel, or Asylum Erotica, Fernando Di Leo, 1971). In these films, which belong to the lower forms of Italian Popular Cinema and are directed by three directors who have a consistent directing style, Kinski plays very different roles: a millionaire husband, a man in search of revenge and a psychiatrist. All three roles are somehow positive roles and present Kinski in different acting dimensions which will allow me to inspect his adaptability to every story he played in. Moreover, the discussion about these movies and Kinski’s performances will be contextualized in relation to the recent debate concerning bad cinema and b-movies and their status in film criticism and film studies. Finally, the aim of this chapter is to trace Kinski’s stylization method and how he was reframed and re-coded by Herzog’s intervention, showing his trajectory without solution of continuity from bad cinema to Herzog’s films.
Liverpool (2008), Argentinean director Lisandro Alonso employs a
distinctive narrative motif, namely the journey of the solitary individual
through desolated landscapes in rural Argentina. From a
comparative point of view, the key to understanding these introverted
trajectories is to consider Alonso’s construction of narrative space
around the misery of a stark void, namely the absence of home. For
Alonso, home is not a peaceful destination, connoting the intimacy
of a family, serenity or simply a place where one is allowed to dream
in peace (Bachelard 1994, 6). The absence of home becomes the
blind spot of these journeys: home turns out to be a broken horizon.
In this essay I will mainly focus on the film Los Muertos and the way
in which it radicalizes narrative space through the combination of
cinematic silence (absence of words and dialogues) and cinematic
slowness (the use of long-takes), while formulating a void which coincides
with the protagonist’s homelessness. Moreover, positioning
my effort within the growing field of slow cinema studies, this essay
considers how Alonso’s radical cinematic realism problematizes the
concept of authenticity in its aesthetic and political dimensions.
I would argue that Antonioni’s early films in general and L’amorosa menzogna in particular, which is constructed in a style based on an extremely refined mise-en-scene, points precisely towards an understanding of (documentary) cinema as “the labour of fiction”, borrowing an expression from Jacques Rancière’s work which will be developed further throughout the essay."
The book was an outcome of the one-year artistic research project 'On Dissent: a collective narrative', conceived and developed by Roberto Cavallini, Carla Esperanza Tommasini and Tuna Yilmaz with the support of EU-Turkey Tandem, a cultural exchange programme by the European Cultural Foundation and Stiftung Mercator, in collaboration with MitOst, Anadolu Kultur and Bilgi University.
The book was published with the support of European Cultural Foundation and Stiftung Mercator and it has been presented in Istanbul (Depo Art Space), Berlin and Trento."
Mosso da questa constatazione – che attraversa il cinema per arrivare al discorso filosofico – il contributo qui offerto tenta di fare luce sulla serieta’ del melodramma, o meglio sul ‘serio melodrammatico’. Esporre il serio al melodrammatico, cio’ che in alcune istanze sfugge ad una semplice caratterizzazione di genere, significa prima di tutto prendere sul serio il genere di per se’ e quindi cominciare ad allentare le sue possibilita’ facendo emergere qualcosa. Significa inoltre rendere giustizia ad una serie di opere il cui contributo va ben al di la’ della risistemazione di un’ipotetica tassanomia cinematografica, imponendo una riflessione sulle possibilita’ stesse del cinema.
Annotato l’intento quindi, il procedimento si e’ incentrato sulla possibilita’ di articolare le passioni considerate piu’ trite del melodramma in modo da mobilitare non cio’ che questi films nascondono, ma cio’ che deve la propria marginalita’ all’evidenza.
L’ovvio del melodrammatico, cio’ che viene subito esposto –passioni inconciliabili con la realta’ esterna –mette in moto un discorso ‘serio’ sull’esaustione del soggetto. Il melodramma, almeno alcuni casi illuminanti, esprime l’insopportabile tensione di una vita senza vergogna.
Il primo contributo di questo volume si concentra in particolare su di uno spostamento decisivo che avviene nel momento in cui il melodramma si sposta (uno spostamento di ritorno) da Hollywood all’Europa. Il confronto in particolare e’ facilitato dall’analisi ravvicinata di un lavoro di Vincent Minnelli e uno del regista tedesco Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
La lettura dell’opera di Chabrol ‘Les Biches’ si pone in quest’ottica come problematica pietra di paragone. Il saggio che vi e’ qui dedicato infatti non ne affronta semplicemente l’emblematicita’, ma la spinge ad un momento di rottura, il momento cioe’ in cui il rapporto erotico come rapporto di possesso sfigura di fronte alla propria promessa.
A concludere il lavoro, l’intervista a Juliane Lorenz, montatrice degli ultimi film di Fassbinder – nonche’ ex-moglie e presidentessa della fondazione intitolata al regista Tedesco – offre alcuni spunti inediti circa lavori non ultimati e ambizioni insoddisfatte del grande autore capace in poco piu’ che quindici anni di carriera di produrre una quarantina di films.
Lo spezzone di sceneggiatura allegato in chiusura – tratto da un lavoro in corso di Daniele Rugo – oltre che come tributo a RWF, intende riaprire idealmente le questioni trattate verso le possibilita’ attuali del melodrammatico.
Damascus: Tourists, Artists, Secret Agents is a pseudo-fictitious encounter of artists, dancers, secret agents, speculative writers, lovers, film-makers and photographers who come together to unravel the rumors, questions and traces of the mysterious disappearances that happen in the subconscious urban setting of one of the world's oldest cities.
The idiosyncratic novel is the outcome of a Reloading Images collaboration and an ongoing platform for artistic research, involving more than thirty international artists and writers. 'Reloading Images: Damascus / Work in Progress 2008' is a playground for discursive practices on artistic agency that happened in relation to Damascus, the actual city, and that of our imagination.
Edited by Kaya Behkalam, Paula Bugni, Beatrice Catanzaro, Roberto Cavallini, Azin Feizabadi, Carla Esperanza Tommasini, Sarah Rifky, Ashkan Sepahvand / Reloading Images
With contributions by Salina Abaza, Jan Ackenhausen, Woroud Ahdali, Isa Andreu, Kaya Behkalam, Omar Berakdar, Paula Bugni, Beatrice Catanzaro, Roberto Cavallini, Mikala Hyldig Dal, Azin Feizabadi, Soudade Kaadan, Sophia Krey-Kolios, Gabriel Martinez, Gabriella Micale, Sanna Miericke, Raqs Media Collective, Rania Mleihi, Ersan Ocak, Juergen Rendl, Sarah Rifky, Adel Samara, Manuela Scebba, Ashkan Sepahvand, Carla Esperanza Tommasini, Hanadi Traifeh, Kianoosh Vahabi and Wu Ming 4
Juliane Lorenz is the director of the Fassbinder Foundation, an organization that seeks to preserve and promote the filmmaker's legacy. She has authored and edited several books on the director's life and work, and has directed a documentary on the same subject.
She has worked as an editor on several of Fassbinder’s pictures, including: Querelle (1982) Veronika Voss (1982), Lola (1981), Lili Marleen (1981), Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), Die dritte Generation (1979), The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), In a Year with 13 Moons (1978), Despair (1978), Germany in Autumn (1978), Bolwieser (1977).
now a museum, which is housed in a building in the Çukurcuma neighbourhood of Beyoğlu, Istanbul, with the 83 chapters transformed into 83 boxes. In this essay I would like to explore the ways in which the gendered objectification of Füsun is enacted in the museum. Füsun is indeed a spectral figure within the museum’s walls: her figure is condensed in every single thing the viewer
encounters yet her absence is signified through the fetishism of objects which in turn are transformed into works of art (Box 68, 4213 Cigarette Stubs, which contains all the cigarette stubs discarded by Füsun and collected by
Kemal between 1976 and 1984, is a telling example in this sense). Pamuk’s achievement, from a Foucauldian perspective, questions the role of museums
as contested sites of knowledge, articulated through the construction of subjectivity and history. However, museums are also gendered spaces of representation and classification. In this sense, various questions should be posited: how is memory performed in the Museum of Innocence? How is the gendering and aestheticization of objects, imposed by Füsun’s spectral absence, played out in this invented and autobiographical wunderkammer of
love? This essay is divided in three parts. In the first part my aim is to consider the Museum of Innocence as a contemporary wunderkammer, briefly retracing
the origin of this tradition until more recent critical examples such as Joseph Cornell’s sculpture boxes, Sophie Calle’s and Mark Dion’s installations until Damien Hirst’s cabinets like ‘The Void’ (2007), which are usually framed
under the caption of the ethnographic turn in contemporary art. The second part will focus on the gendering of space within the Museum of Innocence through the spectral figure of Füsun. My claim is that Füsun’s objectification could be interpreted through Luce Irigaray’s notion of the feminine as an inscriptional space, that is as a mere mirroring of masculinity. The third part of the essay will consider how Pamuk’s artistic endeavour could exemplify an act of secondary memory (Nora) or prosthetic memory (Lindsberg), an interruption of modernity inscribed between the materiality of common things and the traces of personal memories. Through these notions, I will propose a shift in signification from the figure of Füsun to the city of Istanbul, a distant and forgotten image of the city in Pamuk’s personal memories.
After a brief examination of the seminal experiences since the 1970s such as Radio Alice (1976-78) and Luther Blissett (1994-1999), I will focus on the recent radical process initiated by a group of ‘creative workers’ with the occupation of Teatro Valle, one of the most prestigious and ancient theatres in Rome, and inspired by the Occupy movement. Since June 2011, throughout Italy, different other occupations occurred (theatres, movie theatres, dismissed factories) to protest against the inefficiency and decline of cultural policies and to actively generate an open platform for educational, cultural and social purposes. These experiences share a similar strategy of self-organization with the previous movements but differ in the ways in which they generate a critical understanding of the conditions of creative production and its distribution.
Within the context of priority shifts and general cuts to higher education funding, the discussion will use the immediate conditions at Middlesex to consider a broader threat to critical thought, lending a voice to the current debates and protests undertaken by students and tutors at the Middlesex campus.
The panel will be chaired by Dr Alberto Toscano (Goldsmiths) with interventions by Prof Alexander Garcia Duttmann (Goldsmiths), Prof Peter Osborne (Middlesex), Dr Nina Power (Roehampton University), Prof Alex Callinicos (Kings College), Ali Alizadeh (Middlesex) and others."
Friday 15th January, 5.00-8.00 RHB 137
Screening of La rabbia (The anger) (1963) by Pier Paolo Pasolini, followed by a
conversation between Alberto Toscano, Roberto Cavallini and Paolo Gerbaudo.
Friday 22nd January, 5.00-8.00 RHB 137
Screening of Die Dritte Generation (The third generation) 1979, by RW Fassbinder.
Followed by a conversation between Alex Duttmann and Tom McCarthy.
Friday 29th January, 5.00-8.00 RHB 137
Screening of Ici et allieurs (Here and Elsewhere) (1976), by Jean-Luc Godard and
Anne-Marie Miéville, followed by a conversation between Roberto Cavallini, Saeed
Taji Farouky and Sam Mcauliffe.
Friday 5th of February, 5.00-8.00 RHB 137
Screening of Coup pour coup (1972) by Marin Karmitz, followed by a discussion
between Alberto Toscano and special guests.
Friday 12th of February, 5.00-8.00 RHB 137
Screening of Queimada (1969) by Gillo Pontercorvo, followed by a conversation
between Alberto Toscano, Peter Hallward and Benjamin Noys about the film, Fanon and
the Haitian revolution.