Bruno Surace

Severely criticized almost unanimously at the time of its release, Francesco Nuti’s “OcchioPinocchio” (1994) represents a rare case of a “cursed” Italian film from the 1990s. It became notorious for its extremely
costly and troubled production, whose release was delayed by a year, as well as for the massive flop that followed, so severe that it marked the decline of Nuti’s career and personal life, despite his previous success as a comedian and director. Twenty years after its release, perhaps it is time to reevaluate
its worth, if not critically, then at least by scientifically identifying the prominent place it occupies within the myriad of cinematic adaptations of Collodi’s Pinocchio. Nuti’s film is indeed, not only in Italy but also
in the international Pinocchio galaxy, the creator of an apocryphal Pinocchio: an adult yet somehow a child due to life’s circumstances, the son of a Geppetto who wants to make him a puppet, forced to flee
through a land of toys that is the wildest and most inhospitable America, in love with a dark version of the fairy whom he ultimately helps. A disoriented Pinocchio made of flesh that must learn to discover itself, even timidly encountering sexuality, unable to lie and thus unsuitable for a world of deceitful adults (starting with his father); a Pinocchio thrown brutally into a world of violence, where he must fend for himself without help (no critique has dwelled on the fleeting yet essential moment when he crushes an
insect with his shoe while uttering “Fuck you, cricket”, thereby affirming his solitude). Thus, “OcchioPinocchio” juggles various aspects of the Collodian discourse, both diegetically (up to the bad ending), and in terms of the physical and psychological construction of the character, who is hurled from Tuscany to the United States, embodying a specific form of Italian identity.

This article outlines the foundations of a semiotics of collecting, from Wunderkammers or cabinets of curiosities to modern digital phenomena such as NFTs. It examines the extent to which the practice of collecting shares similarities with the semiotic research methodology of creating meaningful analytical corpora. It discusses the market and symbolic aspects of collections, addressing their transformative value and the transition from objects that gain value through collecting to those produced as collectibles in the punctum.gr f irst place. The role of online platforms in the presentation and valuation of collections is emphasized, particularly in the context of online entertainment and user-generated content; the compulsive nature of modern media consumption makes it comparable to a form of collecting. Collecting must be understood as a theoretical category and epistemological horizon essential to the organization and understanding of objects and concepts in various disciplines

This original and interdisciplinary volume, edited by Massimo Leone, explores the contemporary semiotic dimensions of the face from both scientific and sociocultural perspectives, putting forward several traditions, aspects, and signs of the human utopia of creating a hybrid face.

The article explores the context of contemporary media, with particular attention to the TikTok universe, identifying a sort of "Twilight Zone" in which contents for adults and new generations mix. Through the analysis of specific cases (the "creepypasta" of Slender Man, the TV series Squid Game, and the film Terrifier), the problematic effects of a fluid media context are highlighted, for which both the new ways of acquiring content and the factual removal of restrictions on access to certain products are responsible. In outlining this new picture of age fluidity, a transversal pedagogy focused on media literacy is proposed as a possible solution for both new and old generations.

If the context of online cultures has definitively reshaped the way in which online content is produced and enjoyed, this also applies to mainstream pornography. This is rapidly passing (or has passed) from a "traditional" fruition context to a new "post-pornographic" structure, in which live streaming through webcams and one-to-one customized content replace the classic tube sites. These new pornographic dynamics, certainly consolidated in the pandemic context, take on a particular cultural relevance when they are subjected to processes of effective normalization of porn, progressively shifted from a territory of marginality to one of discursive centrality. Although this type of movement can constitute a proof of emancipation, its dark side is instead the loss of the original subversive charge of pornography, consequent to the removal of a taboo often and willingly raised exclusively in favor of neoliberal economic dynamics. The state of health of pornography, in the postpornographic era, appears ambiguous, since a paradoxical "removal of the removed" corresponds to an immoderate quantitative increase in performers, dedicated platforms, and discourses, and therefore a phenomenological flattening. Therefore, the purpose of the essay is to explore the new post-pornographic horizon in a systemic perspective, noting its criticalities.

Hermeneutics of the Cinematic Autobiopic: The Charlie Kaufman Case Cinema and contemporary TV series seem to have firmly embraced a new "genre", the biopic, as an audiovisual story of individual lives that extends more and more towards subjects once outside the criteria of common "biographability". If until a few decades ago the audiovisual biography was in fact reserved to characters whose noteworthiness was considered consolidated on the basis of specific socially shared assumptions (politicians, kings, leaders), today almost anyone seems potentially deserving of a biopic. This spasmodic attention towards audiovisual biographies is also manifested in the evident and growing production of "autobiopics", which foresee a more or less marked intersection between the enunciating and the enunciated instance. The categories of analysis related to the traditional biopic therefore require reviewing, because they are only partially able to detect the specificities of the cinematic-autobiographical tale. At the same time, the formulation of a hermeneutics of the autobiopic can provide updates on the functioning of the cinematic narrative of the self. The case of Charlie Kaufman, screenwriter and director whose complete work appears as a gigantic and at times convoluted self-description, is the ideal laboratory for testing this new analytical system.

Today's pornography constitutes a semiotic laboratory capable of meticulously describing some characteristics of the cultures from which it comes and for which it is intended. In it, the role of the face is preeminent and assumes relevance both from a diegetic and a formal point of view. A face which makes itself a sign and is articulated in a dialectic between the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic axis, finding expression as an aspectual device, establishing a peculiar semiotic procedure of absentia in praesentia, and highlighting an eminently enunciative dimension of the textual genre. Thus a facial semiotics of pornography becomes to all effects a cultural semiotics, which through the exploration of a transversal genre-both in its mainstream and more niche actualizations-produces significant results in defining how cultures of the face, including extrapornographic ones, delineate themselves. The aim of this article is to verify this peculiar facial semiotics through a case history that stretches from traditional to contemporary pornography, also analysing the "facial pornography" website beautifulagony.com and the visual works of some contemporary artists.

There exist texts, often of a ludic or manifestly artistic nature, that seriously query the univocal relationship between signifier and signified, the epistemology of the expression–content type. They are texts written in “impossible” languages, a–semic alphabets indecipherable by statute, which are however able to emanate enormous amounts of meaning for common readers, sometimes catapulting them into a playful childlike dimension, as well as challenging semioticians and linguists, even making them reconsider the theme of idiolect. This amounts to the opening up of a crisis not in any given language, but in the idea of language itself, and perhaps in the idea of the signs that should constitute it. This occurs, for example, in Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus, in Kunizo Matsumoto’s Art Brut, and in certain moments in the cinema of Leos Carax. In these cases, marked and obsessive emissions of signifiers do not coincide with precise signifieds, even if, on account of contextual an...

El cortometraje de Alejandro Pérez El autómata (2016) presenta una serie de instancias relevantes con respecto al tema del rostro transhumano, que se convierte en una alegoría de la relación con la alteridad en sus varias facetas y abre una reflexión significativa sobre la relación que la humanidad mantiene consigo misma en el pasado, presente y futuro. Gracias a las herramientas de la semiótica es posible extrapolar los valores presentes en la película en el marco de una estética peculiar de la chatarra, la escoria, los restos. Palabras clave: El autómata, rostro transhumano, semiótica de la chatarra, alteridad, semiótica del rostro.

The Uncanny Valley, hypothesized by Masahiro Mori in 1970, theorizes about a sensation of discomfort evoked in humans on exposure to anthropomorphic artificial bodies that preserve some mechanical features. The aims of this paper are multiple. Firstly, to confirm the truth of this hypothesis, which has often been the subject of controversy but which has been amply demonstrated in experimental settings and anecdotic evidence. Secondly, to focus the study of the Uncanny Valley on the face, considered as central in the manifestation of the phenomenon. Thirdly, to provide a description of this occurrence as not exclusively a neuroscientific or psychological matter, but also as an issue of extreme semiotic relevance, through the meta-analysis of recent experiments and the treatment of some cinematographic cases known to have generated the Uncanny Valley experience in the audience.

The notion of "Snapchat Dysmorphia", which we extend here to a more generic "Selfie Dysmorphia", has been under discussion online for at least a couple of years. It concerns the increasingly widespread inability to accept one's own appearance and the spasmodic need to control it through filters and post-production effects with the smartphone. This trend, which from epidemic is becoming endemic, configures an unprecedented modality of relationship with one's own body and its image, specifically (but not only) facial. A new semiopolitics of bodies is developing, with not only psychosocial but also socio-semiotic consequences which summon up complex notions such as that of the figure, an in-depth reflection on the interpretative dynamics involved in the choice of pertinentising some plastic configurations of images as figuratively salient, and a reflection on the semantics of the concept of "disfiguration" as an isotopy of contemporary society. Premessa Obiettivo di questo articolo è, a partire da una nozione semiotica come quella di "figura", ampiamente problematica eppure di fatto diffusamente adoperata anche nel linguaggio comune, costruire una specifica riflessione su una sorta di ideologia sociosemiotica della sfigurazione, che sembra diffondersi a macchia d'olio se si osservano le macrotendenze nell'utilizzo contemporaneo dei social media. Si tratta della cosiddetta "selfie dysmorphia", locuzione divenuta notoria anche in seguito ad alcuni approfondimenti dedicategli più nella letteratura grigia (almeno ad oggi) che in quella scientifica. Va da sé che il tema si pone come rilevante su vari livelli, che verranno gradualmente esplorati. Il primo è quello della categoria di "figura", con il pesante carico semantico che porta con sé e riversa nei suoi concetti derivativi: "figurato", "figurativo", "figurale", fino a "sfigurato". Proprio dall'idea di sfigurazione ci si sposterà quindi su quella figura specifica che è il volto, e da lì sulle politiche di gestione semiotica del volto proprio e di quello altrui, attraverso quella che appare come una estetica condivisa e paradossale: la standardizzazione dei propri connotati mediante filtri (digitali, ma pure analogici, quali certe espressioni e pose) che retoricamente si pongono come operazioni originalmente metasemiotiche, ma in realtà sono sintomo e risultato di un'epidemia culturale sostanzialmente a matrice ansiogena. Queste tesi verranno verificate sia analizzando i comportamenti e i protocolli di costruzione del proprio volto online, sia mediante un'esplorazione delle piccole ma significative parti dedicate alla questione nel film The Social Dilemma (Jeff Orlowski 2020).

That of filmic enunciation is an open and never entirely closed problem. Film as a specific does not lend itself to the tendency of the classic semiotic theory of enunciation based on a glottocentric matrix. Furthermore, the film, as a syncretic and constitutively multi-authorial and multi-level text, is an act of parole far more complex than a verbal text. The aim of this paper is therefore to explore the varied mix of issues related to the filmic enunciation, starting from the impasse of classical glottocentrism, already widely criticized by the traditional semiotics of cinema, engaging the debate in the context of a foundational "metalinguisticity" of cinema, intended as a system of articulation first of all of gazes, and finally attempting to propose a theoretical framework for which filmic enunciation is not an exclusively textual problem, but also an interpretative one, to be approached from the side of the viewer. 1. Oltre il glottocentrismo Christian Metz definisce l'enunciazione come "l'atto semiologico attraverso il quale alcune parti di testo ci parlano di quel testo come di un atto" (1994, p. 19). Ma che atto è il film? La definizione dell'enunciazione, così come rilevato da Metz, è usualmente impostata su una matrice glottocentrica, a partire dalla nota teorizzazione di Émile Benveniste (1966). Appena ci si discosta da un contesto verbale i problemi tuttavia insorgono, dal momento che se "l'enunciazione è definita come il meccanismo di generazione di un testo, l'apparizione nell'enunciato del soggetto dell'enunciazione" (Kébrat-Orecchioni 1980, p. 30), nel cinema "le marche di enunciazione non rimandano direttamente a un locutore, ma più generalmente a un progetto comunicativo; non alle circostanze concrete di produzione dell'enunciato (cioè al processo di lavorazione), ma alle intenzionalità che lo hanno determinato e che lo permeano" (Sainati 1987, p. 41). Il glottocentrismo pertanto, fondato sulla presenza di un locutore, per quanto sia un retaggio difficile da scardinare richiede di essere riconsiderato alla luce della complessità del testo filmico, 1 notoriamente sincretico. Così quasi tutti gli autori che si occupano di enunciazione cinematografica partono da Benveniste, cercando però di traslare il tema dell'hic et nunc simulato nel discorso verbale nel "discorso cinematografico", come ad esempio Michel Marie: Trasposta in ambito cinematografico, l'enunciazione è ciò che permette a un film, a partire dalle potenzialità inerenti al cinema, di prendere corpo e di manifestarsi. Ma l'idea linguistica di enunciazione si basa sul fatto che un testo è sempre scritto da qualcuno per qualcun altro, in un 1 Una complessità di grande rilevanza per la semiotica del cinema, e che anche negli approcci più recenti, pur se con le dovute interpolazioni con i nuovi orizzonti delle neuroscienze, non cessa di fondarsi su un discorso testualistico. Nel merito cfr. Dusi (2015). Sulla relazione fra aspetto discorsivo e strutture profonde nel testo filmico e non solo cfr. anche Ferraro e Santangelo (2017). Alla questione è dedicato anche Paolucci (2020), volume in uscita durante la stesura di queste pagine, ma già presentato nei suoi presupposti teoretici durante il XLVII Congresso AISS a Siena.

For a Semio-nissologic Typology.

This paper proposes a reflection on the notion of island and on its cultural productivity grounded in its morphological, logistical and symbolical features. First of all, we present a brief overview of the semiotic properties of water, underlining how it affects anthropic spaces such as cities and the way we interpret them. The second paragraph is dedicated to rethinking the relationship between semiotics and logistics, avoiding any reductionist or hypodermic approach, but taking into account the importance that viability has on semiosphere dynamics. In the third paragraph, we have constructed a typology of islands-real and fictional-based on the perviousness of the channel that connects them to land and on their connotations as examples of the ideological nature/culture dichotomy. Finally, in the conclusions, we have expanded these considerations to the metaphorical uses of the concepts of island and isolation, arguing that they constitute fundamental semiotic cultural unities.

Objective of this paper is that of investigating fridge magnets, significant souvenirs but also relevant existential devices, in an attempt to capture not so much their representational as their evocative appeal, which is held to lie at the base of the success of the objects in question. The essay consults the tools of visual semiotics, highlighting its limits and opening itself up to other possibilities. Fridge magnets become instances of transcendental texts, able to evoke something which oversteps their textuality and therefore requires different philosophical formulae. I. La semiotica, i magneti (e la zangola) Che la semiotica non si sia mai metodicamente occupata di magneti pare, di primo acchito, una lacuna assai modesta. Tuttavia riflettendoci poco più sopra la mancanza assume tutta un'altra dimensione. Senza di essi non si avrebbero, almeno nelle forme con cui li conosciamo, i computer, gli schermi televisivi, le carte di credito, i microfoni, diversi tipi di motori, solo per riferirci a una parte minima degli oggetti che strutturano la realtà novecentesca. Potremmo aggiungere, tanto per far intendere la gravità della questione, che senza magneti e magnetismo non ci sarebbero state le bussole (con buona pace dell'esplorazione del pianeta), ma neppure gli acceleratori di particelle e i maglev (treni a levitazione magnetica). Insomma, già un piccolo e

There exist texts, often of a ludic or manifestly artistic nature, that seriously query the univocal relationship between signifier and signified, the epistemology of the expression-content type. They are texts written in "impossible" languages, a-semic alphabets indecipherable by statute, which are however able to emanate enormous amounts of meaning for common readers, sometimes catapulting them into a playful childlike dimension, as well as challenging semioticians and linguists, even making them reconsider the theme of idiolect. This amounts to the opening up of a crisis not in any given language, but in the idea of language itself, and perhaps in the idea of the signs that should constitute it. This occurs, for example, in Luigi Serafini's Codex Seraphinianus, in Kunizo Matsumoto's Art Brut, and in certain moments in the cinema of Leos Carax. In these cases, marked and obsessive emissions of signifiers do not coincide with precise signifieds, even if, on account of contextual and plastic specificities, they invite decrypting. The act of writing, for these authors, is often first of all the manifestation of an agency, which produces a text leaning heavily towards the phatic side. This happens when the obsession of putting the world into language clashes with parts of the world that refuse to be language-ized. The objective of this essay is to investigate this rich and not very explored context, which challenges some of the inner certainties of semiotics itself.

Akira Kurosawa's 1950 Rashomon is unanimously considered one of the masterpieces of film history. It has been treated far and wide, and continues today to attract interest from cinephiles and scholars. It is a genuinely open work, which among others has been dealt with by Ugo Volli who decided to focus on its pre-eminently metacommunicative aspect. His analysis is in the form of a video essay in the Italian edition of the DVD film (Dolmen Home Video, 2007). It is from this analysis-unfortunately rare, and therefore extremely precious, in the light of this semioti-cian's range of interests-that the present essay departs,setting itself at least three objectives: to start from the analytical elements raised by Volli and use them as bases for a more in-depth study, to intrinsically detect how the semiotic approach can be significant in filmic analysis, and to suggest a theory of metacinema as a more complex device than the classic definition of "cinema that speaks of itself ".

The Shoah has been an unhealable fracture in history, incontrovertibly reconfiguring the concepts of representation and representability. This fracture is central to a vast production of works in both the  historiographic and artistic fields and, in the middle, of “documentary”
works. In such a motley landscape certain authors have chosen to undertake a hard task: reconstructing the memory of an event that is so traumatic. Sergei Loznitsa’s Austerlitz (2016) constitutes a film which strongly works in this direction. In it there is a focalization on the
“dark tourists” of a lager who are decentralized in relation to the ineffable theme. There is a degeneration of the idea of testimony, subject to an ambiguous and constant process of contemporary remediation, and of the standard codes of doc cinema, which question the actual statute of documentary, historical memory, perception and propioception in the present.

Seen from a Western perspective, contemporary Chinese cinema seems to be characterized by two interrelated dimensions: a positive tendency to formal experimentation and a stimulating-and maybe symptomatic-obsession with issues related to time. The purpose of my paper is to investigate the relationship between these two features utilizing a comparative approach. Time as an aesthetic object pervades Chinese cinema across genres and atmospheres, from drama to comedy, from thriller to documentary. Despite the differences between these kinds of movies, the theme conceals a sort of common key, which can be used to interpret Chinese culture and tastes. I will attempt to provide the semiotic schemes for comprehending how time is quantitatively and qualitatively created in a corpus of movies, also comparing them to their ideal counterparts in Western cinemato-graphy in order to pinpoint the reciprocal formal specificities. Mountains May Depart (山河故人, Jia Zhangke, 2015) splits itself in a sort of dialectic between past, present and future, and reflects on the trauma of separation; Black Coal, Thin Ice (白日焰火, Diao Yinan, 2014) combines the feel of noir movies with the materiality of time; A Touch of Sin (天注定, Jia Zhangke, 2013) juxtaposes four different space-times, uniting them with a violence which is highly metaphorical, as happens , for example, in the postmodern splatter of Quentin Tarantino; Mrs. Fang (Wang Bing, 2017) follows in a documentary frame the life of a woman affected by Alzheimer's disease, with a slow rhythm which clashes with the frenzy of modern life, configuring two times that interface by reflecting on the importance of memory. At the end of my paper the peculiarity of time in contemporary Chinese cinema will emerge, both from a stylistic and a symbolic point of view.

English title: Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics of Martyrdom in Pascal Laug- ier's Martyrs

Martyrs is a 2008 film by Pascal Laugier that has since gained a niche cult following of enthusiasts of this genre and is considered to have pioneered a kind of Nouvelle Vague in contemporary French horror films. Right from the title the category of martyr is central to the film, but Martyrs presents a significant re-articulation. While classical martyrdom was founded on faith, with the martyr who is such inasmuch as he/she is recognised by some and disavowed by others (and this is the perspective which substantiates his/her martyrdom) making a choice, the martyrdom in Martyrs is instead the fruit of an imposition in which faith is transliterated by the martyr to whoever makes her a martyr, be it religious or secular faith in some or other conviction. This significantly modifies the entire prospective apparatus. The film thus proposes an overturning of classical martyrdom while at the same time reflecting on it in all the semiotically relevant situations: syntactic, semantic, and even pragmatic, revealing in a programmed fashion the ideologies that are subject to martyrdom. The martyr in Martyrs is necessarily female, member of an impoverished class and tortured by a sect of prosperous individuals. Also, she is a martyr who becomes a sign in the Peircean sense and who, in the act of martyrdom, is presented as a heterotopia capable of using her language to mediate between here and elsewhere. Martyrs is thus a film founded on the hybridization of codes and featuring numerous gory images, but it is also part thriller, with features of the home invasion genre, part psychological drama, part revenge movie and part torture porn. Above all, however, it is a film whose nature is pre-eminently philosophical, woven in the close relationship between plot and image.

In 1942 a troupe of German servicemen shot a film in the ghetto
of Varsavia which was subsequently found in an archive only in the 1960s.
For over 30 years historians used this film as a base for their studies of life
in the ghetto. In 1998, however, another reel was discovered containing
elements which had been excluded from the first, and which made it
clear that the situations shown in Das Ghetto were for the most fruit
of a mis–en–scene, staged by the Nazis for purposes of propaganda.
Historians had placed their trust in a text without knowing its context.
In 2010, Israeli director Yael Hersonski produced A Film Unfinished, for
the first time including in the same film Das Ghetto and the revealing 1998
reel, and editing everything together with testimonies of survivors and
extracts from diaries and documents belonging to those who had lived
in the ghetto. The result is a film of rare complexity, where numerous
layers of intentionality are entwined. The aim of this essay is to propose
an analysis of the dialectic of intentions inscribed in A Film Unfinished
and how this relates to Das Ghetto. Parallel to the narrative and formal
inquiry, it will be necessary to re–examine the paradigm of “textual
autonomy” and define the way in which semiotics can interface with
historical research through intentional analysis.

Quello del disaster movie è un genere cinematografico oramai canonizzato, e in quanto tale soggetto a parodie, che si possono intendere come forme di spirito critico nei confronti di questa o quell’ideologia. La catastrofe come canone è in effetti il terreno di coltura perfetto per ideologemi, termine – oggi in disuso – che deriva dai formalisti russi (in primis Michail Bachtin) e che viene poi sviluppato lungamente da Julia Kristeva. Gli ideologemi si potrebbero pensare come delle tracce di ideologia nella grana del testo in quanto dispositivo intrinsecamente intertestuale, e per di più connesso a un determinato contesto socio-storico. Il compito di parodia, burla, satira, farsa, scimmiottatura, e così via, è proprio quello di disinnescare l’ideologema, paradossalmente massimizzandone la presenza fino alla sua degenerazione (una sorta di sistematica reductio ad absurdum). Tali esercizi pertanto si configurano come pratiche metatestuali, che individuano le zone che del testo sanciscono il genere per enfatizzarne il più possibile i meccanismi, allo scopo di renderli visibili. Si tratta, nella fattispecie, di individuare quella “tensione del desiderio” che per Žižek è il motivo ricorrente del piacere tratto dall’ideologia. Nell’era dunque della consacrazione della catastrofe come euristica imputata all’interpretazione di molti fatti del mondo, spesso in misura aberrante (si pensi ai cospirazionismi programmatici del web), è quanto mai utile indagare le forme della sua desacralizzazione. Ciò verrà fatto a partire dall’analisi di una serie di parodie della catastrofe cinematografica, con l’obiettivo di individuare nel tragicomico catastrofico, e nelle risate che ne derivano, la presa di coscienza del tessuto ideologico che soggiace al canone.

Declaring in an academic environment that one deals with semiotics of cinema, or with semiotics and cinema, is always a risk, often met with sceptical grimaces. The term “semiotics of cinema” evokes an era which is perceived as being antiquated, crystallized on the names of Eco
and Metz and on a structuralism which many, perhaps justly, consider outdated. The problem is not to be underestimated: if semiotics does not possess the tools with which to approach the cinema fully in its epistemic horizon, then it has failed from the start, since much of the sense we experience daily has a filmic basis. Asserting the death of semiotics of cinema thus amounts to endorsing the death of semiotics itself. It seems suicidal for a discipline to exclude itself from
one of the domains which it should regard as fundamentally preeminent. In order to overcome this impasse, therefore, it could be worth starting a programmed dialogue between the semiological apparatus and the instruments of film studies and aesthetics, abandoning a hegemonic
propensity which is anachronistic in this era of crisis of the human sciences. The purpose of my contribution is to propose some theoretical bridges that demonstrate how this debate would be fruitful in order to attest how semiotics has never been more alive.

Versus Semiosics. The Case of Filmic Crossover. Versus, or vs, is commonly conceived of as a logical construct which identifies two oppositional categories. It is usually thought of as a theoretical divisive object. We nevertheless think that it could be more advantageous to reframe it as a semiosic tool which unifies, modeling the spaces of differences. The vs builds a polarized spectrum around two categories and allows the circulation of meaning which is otherwise without trajectories; it is the backbone of a topology of meaning, the implicit engine of the Greimasian semiotic square, the post-litteram manifestation of the Heraclitian doctrine of contraries. Today the vs is however further connoted and axiolo-gized, not designating only a detachment, a disconnection, a differentiality, but also a sort of intrinsic struggle between the poles it separates. A reciprocal nemesis. In cinema and in its paratexts, which we will investigate, the vs forms the crossover point, the union of two otherwise disjointed narrative universes which through it can interpolate themselves in a conflict that is also a meeting.

Pubblicato in Mangiapane, Francesco eds. 2018. Cuccioli, pets e altre carinerie. Numero monografico di E|C (http://www.ec-aiss.it/monografici/22_cuccioli.php).

È oggi tendenza assai diffusa quella di considerare i cuccioli, umani o animali che siano, come sorte di vite in potenza, la cui caratteristica primaria è una primigenia illibatezza d'animo. Così i bambini in fasce, liberi dal giogo della socializzazione, sono letti e divulgati nei termini di una speranza primordiale, ancorché vessati inconsapevolmente da una responsabilità non richiesta, quella di essere associati alla retorica del “classe dirigente che verrà”, del “futuro”, e simili. Si profila però,
fra le pieghe di quest'immaginario teso a celebrare i neonati come portatori di una benevolenza assoluta, un contro-immaginario più inquietante, anche se certamente più veritiero: il cucciolo come
contenitore vuoto, pronto a essere abitato da questa o quella educazione, da questa o quella ideologia, in ultima analisi dal Bene o dal Male. A dare conto di questa visione collettiva è in primis il cinema, che fa di frequente dell'infante una figura criptica, le cui intenzioni e possibilità risultano parzialmente o del tutto indecifrabili da parte del mondo contrappostogli degli adulti. A partire da questa premessa si staglia lo sterminato panorama di un certo cinema horror ove i bambini, o in alcuni casi i neonati, data la loro sostanziale verginità socio-psichica, si fanno contenitori di un male metafisico previa possessioni (che riducono il cucciolo a una sorta di simulacro – o capsula –
enunciazionale), o in casi meno gravi rapporti comunicativi “aumentati” con entità maligne. Caso emblematico è Rosemary's Baby (Polanski 1968) ove il cucciolo, appena nato, diviene involucro atto a contenere il demonio in persona, o L'esorcista (Friedkin 1973) ove similmente un antico demone abita la pelle di una bambina, o ancora Il sesto senso (Shyamalan 1999) in cui il bambino di turno è una sorta di medium fra il mondo dei vivi e quello dei morti, e così via. Dall'altro lato,
contro le forze del male, si assiste all'impotenza del mondo adulto, desideroso di contrapporre il riempimento demoniaco dei cuccioli che ritiene suoi con misurate quantità di bene. Ecco quindi
intersecarsi due assiologie di fondo, e cioè quella assolutistica e manichea che vede il male e il bene come poli diametrali, ma anche quella dell'adulto speculare al cucciolo, ove il primo si arroga il
diritto (sussunto per ordini anagrafici) di inserire un educazione nel secondo. Quest'ultimo paradigma, interiorizzato come un unicum dalle società occidentali, è stato più volte messo in discussione in termini di immaginario, come nel celebre caso de Il signore delle mosche (Golding
1954), romanzo che vede la creazione di una micro-società gestita da ragazzi – lessema “ombrello” che racchiude in sé una variabile fascia di età solitamente intesa fra l'infanzia e l'adolescenza –, ma
anche in generale tutto il “cinema per ragazzi” di derivazione spielberghiana (si pensi a E.T. l'extraterrestre, Hook – Capitan uncino, A.I. Intelligenza artificiale,...), in cui il mondo degli adulti è relegato in una posizione marginale e i sistemi di valori sono interamente gestiti da bambini e adolescenti (la cui “cucciolosità” si perpetra in un regime anagrafico non più chiaramente definito), capaci di esplorare il mondo mediante una purezza esclusiva, come nell'iconico caso de I Goonies (Donner 1985) o di Gremlins (Dante 1984), dove la salvezza del mondo è affidata proprio a ragazzi, e dove inoltre il modello del cucciolo contenitore è riproposto in versione proto-animale dal
gremlin, abitabile dal bene assoluto (in questo senso simile, anche in termini fisiognomici, al tòpos del gattino), o dal male più mefitico (che lo ri-pertinentizza anche figurativamente). Obiettivo di
questo saggio è dunque tracciare una semiotica del cucciolo cinematografico – in primis umano, ma anche animale – come figura attanziale in cui si incapsulano nel contempo assiologie e ideologie.
Per far ciò ci si avvarrà di analisi testuali circoscritte da un lato all'universo del cinema horror, trasversalmente (come dimostra, ad esempio, il filone del J-Horror da cui molto cinema occidentale
ha attinto, come nei casi di The Grudge (Shimizu 2004) e The Ring (Verbinski 2002)) costellato di cuccioli, e dall'altro al cinema (dei e) per ragazzi. Le analisi testuali permetteranno di individuare i
tratti distintivi dell'immaginario dei bambini intesi come figure archetipiche incontaminate, ma anche e sopratutto inquietanti poiché sostanzialmente imperscrutabili, di identificare stilemi formali
e programmi narrativi che li rendono tali.

Understanding virality as a communicative model means investigating
not only the characteristics of the texts that are described as
“viral”, but also the movement they effect within the websphere and
on the normative components which regulate the itineraries of spreadability.
The text which explodes suddenly in terms of diffusion is viral,
yet its diffusion complies with a precise logic, a precise etiquette of virality.
The objective of this paper is therefore to formulate a semiotics
of the etiquette which starts from the offline world and then spills into
online reality. Having established this methodological base, which will
prove itself useful in supplying the competences for treating etiquette as a
pre–semiosic device capable of soothing certain areas of the semiosphere
and arousing others, we will then concentrate on sociosemiotic phenomena
of departure from etiquette as forms of counter–virality which
are particularly significant in the definition of Web culture: from the
Facebook pages dedicated to programmatic political incorrectness to
historic sites like 4chan. Finally, the DeepWeb will be examined with the
instruments of semiotics in an attempt to identify its deep, structural
viral predisposition, which differs substantially from the common conception
of virality, and to define an analytical model which can capture
its various nuances, from the Torrent universe to DeepWeb sites such
as the famous Silk Road (now fallen into disuse).

The Greimasian semiotic perspective defines the sentient subject's perception of the world as, first of all, a narratological operation. Thus not only are " canonically " narrative texts (novels, movies, comics, etc) decodified as Stories, but also the places we live in, the clothes we wear, and finally the objects we encounter during our lives. Semiotics has, in fact, devoted a lot of attention to objects and, conversely, drawn advantageous theoretical models from them, such as – unus pro omnibus – that of affordances, which sees the object as a Gestalt of narrative programmes more or less able to narrate certain functions. In this objectual landscape the drone is a pervasive presence. It is an object capable of telling stories (from the most tragic stories related to the war drone and to its double dimension of, on the one hand, scopic device for filming areas and transmitingt their images and, on the other, blasting tool, to more simple stories like those deriving from " domestic " drones utilized for para-cinematographic or advertising purposes), but it is also and above all an object which narrates itself, combining preeminent dimensions, from the toy-ludic one to the primitive and anthropological one related to flying, from the technological one – able to enchant technomaniac audiences – to the proto-panoptic one. The ensemble of possible utilizations intrinsically suggested by the " domestic " drone comprehends a conglomeration of narrative extensions that deserve to be analysed. The investigation of the semio-narrative structures conveyed by the drone means a better understanding of the peculiarities of contemporary imaginaries, and this is precisely the objective of this dissertation, interpolating semiotics with onticology, a discipline which sees objects as entities capable of shaping new physical and semiosic itineraries.

The challenge faced in this paper is to attempt to formulate a semiotic analysis around the works of Kunizo Matsumoto, Japanese exponent of Art Brut affected by mental illness. Interfacing with the textualities produced by Matsumoto, thousands upon thousands of pages generated by a form of compulsive graphomania, means questioning some of the premises of general semiotics and of its approach to art: the concept of " autonomy of the text " , the issue of the author's intentionality, the relationship between communication and signification, the conception of artistic discourse as a rhetorical form, the ambiguous existence of idiolect, the interpolation of the borders between symbolism and iconism. These issues will be subjected to examination in a dissertation which, before embarking on a specifically visual-plastic analysis, will try to delineate the relationship between mental pathology and artistic production in a semiotic regime which can in some way help extrapolate the domains of sense in the works of Matsumoto, providing a possible epistemological pattern to account for the manner in which irregular art is semiotized. In order to substantiate the questions raised above, at the centre of the paper there will, in fact, be a discussion of the possibilities of a signifier for its own sake, released from Saussure's dual conception of sign, which will lead to a new definition of artistic discourse as a " breaking free from the code " based on the metabole of repetition , a rhetorical device able to describe " lateral " forms of art, such as those produced under an obsessive psychic regime, within a sort of fractal semiotics open to objective analysis. Starting from a hermeneutic declination of Davidson's " principle of charity " , this may produce semiosic results with reference to the text beyond the psychopathological specifics – which are of fundamental relevance also in pre-semiotic areas – of the subject who elaborated it, freeing Matsumoto's work from the yolk of an interpretation burdened by biological determinism.

The illusionist enunciates his texts on the basis of calibrated exercises in self-censorship. He is above all an actor performing a narrative plot and, as such, embodies a dual agency divided between what is concealed – that is, the action really executed for the realisation  of the trick – and what is revealed – the moment of conjury effected through the staging of appearance disguised as being. On the level of cultural semiotics this scheme, fruitfully related to Greimas' square of veridiction, persists from semiosphere to semiosphere, in space and time. Whether it be prestidigitation, escapology, mentalism or  card manipulation through sleight of hand, the magician conceals in order to reveal. The objective of this paper is to investigate the semiotic mechanisms underpinning this relationship of significant complementarity  between self-censorship and  mise-en-scène shared, what's more, by both the main currents of  magic  identified in the anthropology of magic: teleological sorcerers, those who give their magic a “pseudo-scientific” value designed to explain (or act upon) otherwise inexplicable cause-effect relationships, and the fairy-tale magicians who create textuality in order to entertain. This dichotomy is enriched by the presence of figures inserted in a domain of otherness, able to overturn the popular imaginary by means of extra-physical marvels, but which concern rather different semiospheres. In the present case the entertainment illusionists insert themselves in the semiosphere of show-business, in cultural topologies endowed with marked contexts of limelight and backstage, where they perpetrate their  conjuring by collocating themselves in the liminal interstice which is the space of self-censorship, the place where the success of the trick is decided. Finally, but equally important, the magician is catharctically conceded the possibility of crossing the frontier towards areas of culture commonly associated with zones of censorship: he dialogues with death, penetrates minds, dissects bodies.

Esiste un nesso fra i film che guardiamo e il modo in cui diamo senso a noi stessi e al nostro abitare il mondo? In che modo le storie sul grande schermo ci aiutano a rifuggire l'horror vacui? Se il cinema veicola un'idea di destino, se guardando i film ci rimane un destino impresso, si possono pensare dei metodi per capire come effettivamente si attua un procedimento tanto delicato ed essenziale? Attraverso una metodologia sfaccettata, che integra semiotica, film philosophy e storia del cinema, questo volume prova a rispondere a simili domande, accompagnandoci in un vertiginoso viaggio attraverso centinaia di film, dal cinema del-le origini a quello contemporaneo, dal cinema d'autore al b-movie, dal cartone animato al documentario, delineando le basi per una teoria della destinalità nel cinema.