Event Details
Mon, November 04, 2024
18:00 – 19:30
VILLA SASSETTI
Villa La Pietra
Via Bolognese, 120
50139 Florence, Italy
Roundtable on the research project
RevIS – Revisualizing Italian Silentscapes (1896-1922)
Luca Mazzei, Associate Professor of Film, University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’
Elisa Uffreduzzi, Research Fellow, University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata.’
Eleonora Sforzi, Lecturer in Fashion, Media and Visual Culture, University of Florence
Moderated by Rossella Catanese, Lecturer, NYU Florence
Cinema, since its origins, has made the landscape a central element of its visual narrative, from the vues of Lumière films to the wilderness of canyons in American Westerns to dystopian representations of modern metropolises, constantly reflecting the state of the social imagination.
Through shots of its iconic spaces, early twentieth-century cinema helped fix a vision of the city as a place of cultural heritage and aesthetic appeal in the collective memory. Florence is thus an effective example for exploring the impact of cinema in the perception of the city since the silent era.
The RevIS – Revisualizing Italian Silentscapes (1896-1922) project explores the relationship between Italian cityscapes and cinema between 1896 and 1922. It studies how films of the early twentieth century helped build and spread an image of Italy as a “cinegenic country,” highlighting Italian cities and landscapes in both fictional and documentary productions. Through archival analysis, the project aims to reveal how the representation of the cinematic landscape influenced the public and historical perception of Italian urban and natural spaces. This is an inter-university project, recognized by the Ministry of University and Research as a research project of relevant national interest (PRIN program) in which the University of Turin, University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata,’ University of Padua, University IUAV of Venice collaborate, active for the three-year period 2022-2025, in partnership with several Italian and international film libraries and archives. To learn more, visit silentscapes.eu
Featured Biographies
Luca Mazzei
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF FILM, UNIVERSITY OF ROME ‘TOR VERGATA.’
Luca Mazzei is Associate Professor of Film at University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata.’ He currently works on early film theories, novels on film, and the role of cinema during the war against the Ottoman Empire (1911). Among his numerous publications, Lucio d’Ambra il cinema (co-edited with A. Aprà), Microteorie. Cinema Muto Italiano (co-ed. with L. Quaresima), Early Film Theories in Italy, 1896-1922 (co-ed. with F. Casetti and S. Alovisio). He directed and co-directed several interdisciplinary projects, all of which won competitive calls: Mafia and Devotion, on the imaginary of Mafia and Anti-Mafia in the media; CineSTory, on the history of the 1926-1935 Roman film company Cines-Pittaluga; Pinocchio900 on the intermedia imaginary of the puppet; and RevIS-Revisualizing Italian Silentscapes (1896-1922), on silent film locations in Italy (2022-2025, PRIN project).
Elisa Uffreduzzi
RESEARCH FELLOW, UNIVERSITY OF ROME 'TOR VERGATA'
Elisa Uffreduzzi is Research Fellow at University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata.’ From 2021 to 2023 she was Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Université Libre de Bruxelles for the research project W.I.S.S.PE.R. – Women’s Impact on Silent Screen Performance Reloaded (https://wissperatulb.com). From 2019 to 2021 she worked for the national film archive (Cineteca Nazionale, Rome), on the project Cinecensura. Her publications include various essays in film studies journals and the books La danza nel cinema muto italiano (Aracne, 2017) and Il buio oltre la siepe (Kaplan, 2024), on Robert Mulligan’s film To Kill a Mockingbird (1962).
Eleonora Sforzi
LECTURER IN FASHION, MEDIA AND VISUAL CULTURE, UNIVERSITY OF FLORENCE
Eleonora Sforzi is a Lecturer in Fashion, Media and Visual Culture at the University of Florence, where she received her PhD in History of Fine and Performing Arts, in co-tutorship with the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. As a post-doctoral researcher, she participated in two PRIN research projects: RevIS -Revisualizing Italian Silentscapes 1896-1922, at the University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata,’ and Cinema and the New Culture of Consumption in Italy (1950-1973), at the ‘D’Annunzio’ University of Chieti-Pescara. She has recently edited, with Fabio Andreazza, the volume Cinema e consumi nelle riviste italiane. Dal dopoguerra agli anni settanta (= Cinema and consumption in Italian magazines. From the Postwar Period to the Seventies), forthcoming.