Clodagh Brook

Book now available for free download in Open Access at MHRA website: https://www.mhra.org.uk/publications/Intermedia-in-Italy

In Italy at the turn of the twentieth century, the arts drew suddenly closer: a curtain was raised on a magical new hybrid art, cinema. There followed an escalation in the birth of new hybrid genres like sound art, video art, graphic art and performance art and new sites and technologies for hybridity were developed: television, video projection, museums as white boxes, computers, the Internet. Some of Italy’s best-known artists and groups got involved in various ways, from the Futurists, to Bruno Munari, Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Gruppo 63, Gianni Toti, Niccolò Ammaniti, and Wu Ming. Many artists we know less well often charted this in-between creative world. This book is rooted in the hypothesis that the ever-closer relations between artistic practices have been a key cultural force driving creativity since the start of the twentieth century. It attempts the first large-scale mapping of this force, providing a new framing, and along the way attempts to uncover some of the reasons behind this change.

Clodagh Brook is Professor in Italian at Trinity College, Dublin; Florian Mussgnug is Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian Studies at University College London; Giuliana Pieri is Professor of Italian and the Visual Arts at Royal Holloway, London.

Marco Bellocchio is one of Italy's most important and prolific directors, with a career spanning five decades. In this book, Clodagh J. Brook explores the boundaries between the public and the private, the political and the personal, and the collective and the individual as they appear in Bellocchio's films. Including work on psychoanalysis, politics, film production, autobiography, and the relationship between film tradition and contemporary culture, Marco Bellocchio touches on fundamental issues in film analysis.

Brook's study interrogates what it means to make personal or anti-institutional art in a medium dominated by a late-capitalist industrial model of production. Her readings of Bellocchio's often enigmatic and perplexing work suggest new ways to answer questions about subjectivity, objectivity, and political commentary in modes of filmmaking. Relating the art of a private director to a public medium, Clodagh J. Brook's work is an important contribution to our understanding of film.

A partire dal XXI secolo le nuove tecnologie e la diffusione di massa dei nuovi media hanno radicalmente cambiato i paradigmi culturali con i quali costruiamo e leggiamo le storie e le nostre narrazioni del passato. Le storie e la Storia vengono sempre più frequentemente narrate oltre la carta stampata attraverso un’ibridazione di vecchi (cinema, televisione, radio) e nuovi media (in primis, Internet e social network). In anni recenti, la narratologia si è così trovata insieme a media studies a discutere criticamente di un interessante fenomeno di migrazione delle storie attraverso i media; fenomeno che nel 2003 Henry Jenkins definisce come “transmedia storytelling” (narrazione transmediale) – “a flow of contents across multiple media channels”. Come Jenkins spiega, la narrazione transmediale è un fenomeno tipico della “cultura convergente” (Jenkins), ovvero della collisione di vecchi e nuovi media. La “cultura digitale” o networked culture ha infatti portato ad una compresenza collaborativa di vecchi e nuovi media che va ben oltre la semplice convergenza tecnologica di cui si parlava già negli anni Ottanta, come ricordano Asa Briggs and Peter Burke nel loro Storia sociale dei media: non si tratta semplicemente di integrare testo, immagine e suoni o di trasferire dei contenuti da un medium all’altro. Il concetto di “narrazione transmediale” viene usato per descrivere il racconto di una storia o della Storia da parte di un numero di autori decentralizzati che condividono e creano contenuti da distribuire attraverso le diverse piattaforme mediatiche. Di fatto, la convergenza dei media consente di costruire vere “galassie” narrative (David Herman, Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory), finzionali o meno, in cui le storie si prestano a svariate diramazioni.
In una prospettiva che si posiziona sul margine tra teoria dell'informazione e teoria critica, questo volume intende esplorare come storia e memoria vengono negoziate nelle nuove pratiche narrative nella cultura italiana del XXI secolo. La prima parte si concentra sulle sperimentazioni letterarie tra stampa e nuovi media, partendo dalla ricezione del concetto di “cultura convergente” nell’ambito della cosiddetta generazione di scrittori italiani Trenta-Quaranta. In particolare, il volume si propone di analizzare in che modo, a partire dalla generale idea di “narrazione transmediale” queste scritture riprendono alcuni concetti già elaborati nella letteratura italiana a partire dagli anni Sessanta, quali “iper-romanzo” e “opera aperta” mettendo in discussione la letteratura tradizionale. La seconda parte prende in considerazione la scrittura della Storia attraverso più media, con particolare attenzione alle pratiche di costruzione, ri-costruzione e manipolazione della memoria collettiva a partire da fatti storici ed eventi collettivi e nuove pratiche di digi-telling nei musei. L’obiettivo di questa seconda parte del volume è di esplorare gli effetti che l’ibridazione multimediale ha sulla rappresentazione della Storia collettiva e in che modo l’audience viene chiamata a collaborare in queste pratiche.

Edited by members of the Department of Italian Studies at the University of Birmingham, and bringing together academics in Britain, Ireland, the US and Italy, this volume takes an international perspective on Italian events. It investigates how resistance to the new conservative culture has been articulated, and how this has been expressed and explained by those involved.

The volume is divided into four areas: 1. The Economic and Media Landscapes, which sets the scene for the rest of the book by explaining how Italian society, and particularly its media environment, have developed in recent years; 2. Political Challenges, which discusses the main threats to the authority and policies of Berlusconi coming from within his own centre-right coalition, the left and social movements; 3. Texts, which analyses films, internet sites, television programmes, novels, newspaper articles and theatre performances that sought to resist increasingly dominant conservative norms and/or respond to events set in motion by the Berlusconi governments;  4.Experiences, covering the voices and practices of those who have opposed Berlusconi from within the cultural industries and identity movements, such as journalists, LGBT activists, feminists and associations representing immigrant communities.

Wide-ranging, innovative and challenging, this volume should appeal to all those who have an interest in Italy, political–, media– and cultural studies.

'It is impossible to say just what I mean!' Prufrock's frustration in Eliot's celebrated poem underlines the pessimistic view of language at the heart of much Modernist poetry. Locating the greatest Italian poet of the twentieth century, Eugenio Montale, firmly within European Modernism, this book examines the struggle with language that is central to his work. What can a poet do when words fail him? Does he put down his pen, retreat into silence? Does he seek instead to push language towards its limits, and, if so, what tools can he employ? What part does metaphor, the via negativa, allusive or understated writing have in this process? These are just some of the issues that Clodagh J. Brook seeks to address. In its unravelling of the inexpressibility paradox, her book offers a new reading of Montale's early verse, and reveals how in articles and metapoetic comments Montale gives us insights into both his poetics and the whole process of expression.

Alessandro Ferrari claims that Catholicism was the only cement binding the newly unified Italy together, a country without a common language or a widespread culture capable of founding civic engagement. Taking a post-secular perspective on religion, which recognizes that religion is not simply a ‘residue’ soon to be extinguished (as Raymond Williams once stated), this article will explore Italian cinema’s contemporary constructions of this national ‘religious cement’ as a putative foundation for identity in 21st century Italy. The article sets out too to show the cracks in the cement: collective identity can only be created by ignoring religious diversity and removing thorny issues from the history of the Catholic church.

... Brook · Beyond silence: the films of Ermanno Olmi 279 A. Signorelli, 'Intervista conErmanno Olmi', in Lontano da Roma: Il cinema di Ermanno Olmi, edited by T. Masoni et al. (Florence, Gruppo editoriale Fiorentino, 1990)), and ...

... Brook · Beyond silence: the films of Ermanno Olmi 279 A. Signorelli, 'Intervista conErmanno Olmi', in Lontano da Roma: Il cinema di Ermanno Olmi, edited by T. Masoni et al. (Florence, Gruppo editoriale Fiorentino, 1990)), and ...

... Both Bellocchio and Fellini have chosen to play with point of view and the image in order to create and dissipate ambiguity. In Vacanza in Val Trebbia, Marco Bellocchio plays a fictionalized version of himself, returning to a house owned by him in Bobbio in the Val Trebbia. ...

What is intriguing about Bellocchio’s films is not so much their manifest attack on Catholicism across five decades of filmmaking but - reading against the surface of the films - the peculiar and continuing lure of the church. Focusing on Bellocchio’s recent cinema (L’ora di religione and Il regista di matrimoni, especially), the article explores the transcending of the real, through the unseen and unsaid, at one end of the spectrum, and the spectacle at the other. Following Baudrillard, spectacle is interpreted as a phenomenon which deals ‘with the human in inhuman ways’. Bellocchio is read, here, as joining an artistic heritage which roots creativity in a mysterious divine source. Catholicism’s iconography provides Bellocchio’s cinema with a set of images without which his camera would lose its object. Bellocchio’s films hint that Catholicism may remain deeply attractive in Italy’s cinema, even where this is firmly disavowed.