Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies最新文献

{"title":"The Battleship Potemkin","authors":"D. Radunović","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0332","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0332","url":null,"abstract":"The Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potёmkin) is Sergei Eisenstein’s second feature film. Produced in 1925 and premiered in January 1926, the film was a watershed moment in the history of Russian and Soviet cinema. In addition, in its home context, Potemkin has asserted that experimental montage is the dominant mode of cinematic storytelling in the Soviet 1920s. Likewise, Potemkin asserted, more vociferously than any other early Soviet film, a specific type of relationship between film/art and state ideology. In the international arena, the worldwide success of the film put the Russian and Soviet cinema on a map for the first time. The triumph of Potemkin announced the advent of the short-lived golden age of early Soviet filmmaking style, hallmarked by the aesthetics of short cuts and fast editing that aimed to challenge the viewers’ perception of the world and posit a revolutionary message. Thematically, the film is set around a historical event, the mutiny on the Imperial Navy armored cruiser Prince Potemkin of Tauris, which took place in June 1905. The events are dramaturgically organized in five parts, emulating, as Eisenstein later recalled, the structure of a classical tragedy (see Eisenstein 2010, cited under Typage Acting). These parts were titled as follows: “Men and Maggots” (Liudi i chervi); “Drama on the Quarter-Deck” (Drama na Tendre); “Appeal from the Dead” (Mertvyi vzyvaet); “Odessa Steps” (Odesskaia lestnitsa); and “Meeting the Squadron” (Vstrecha s eskadroi). Each of the parts is endowed with dramatic function and facilitates a transition to a different mood. The events in Part 1 gradually build narrative tension toward a culmination point in Part 2, and, similarly, the events in Part 3 set the scene for the culmination in Part 4, with Part 5 functioning as an epilogue. A believer in traditional aesthetics and concepts such as organicist whole or golden ratio, Eisenstein argued that dramaturgy of the moving image, facilitated through conflicting montage sequences, can deliver the task of revolutionary art, bringing the viewer into a desired psycho-emotional state that would make one susceptible to the right ideological messages. For all these reasons, the apprehension of Potemkin requires the researcher to acknowledge a number of aspects of the film. Given that Potemkin is a historical film par excellence, the relationship between the fictional narrative, historical period under consideration, and historical time of the making of the film ought to be given due attention. In addition, the production history of Potemkin also matters, as it tells much about the position of the film in the nascent Soviet cinematic “dispositive.” Last, but certainly not least, Potemkin is an artistic tour de force that deploys complex cinematic devices, the understanding of which will be a demanding task as well.","PeriodicalId":41388,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies","volume":"23 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84839961","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Photography and Cinema","authors":"Temenuga Trifonova","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0329","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0329","url":null,"abstract":"A number of studies have explored the notions of “medium specificity” and “intermediality,” while others have analyzed the different ways in which photographs and films signify or the different phenomenological experiences they make possible. The notions of “photographic truth,” “indexicality,” “stillness,” and “movement,” and the relationship of photography and cinema to life, death, history, memory, and the unconscious, are recurring themes. The scholarship on photography and that on cinema trace two parallel tendencies in the history of the two media: on the one hand, the photograph as “trace” versus the tradition of staged photography; on the other hand, the “realist” versus “formalist” tendency in cinema. For most of its history, photography has been said to enjoy a privileged relationship to reality: the photograph has been described as “an imprint,” “a mold,” or “a trace” of reality. Parallel to the idea of the photographic index and the photography of spontaneous witness it gave rise to, however, is another tradition of photography, one that runs from early staged photography and pictorialist photography, through surrealist photography, to “cinematic photography”—this tradition foregrounds the discursive character of the photographic image, its origins in other images. While the history of photography has been defined by the tension between these two parallel traditions, the balance of power shifting from one to the other and back again, the digital turn is generally believed to have put an end to the idea of photography as “witness,” even as a number of early-21st-century photographers claim to pursue “new documentary” or “new realism” within a highly stylized, staged photography. The digital has provoked similar anxieties among film historians and theorists, who continue to debate whether the digital has brought about the disappearance of “cinema” or just the disappearance of “film.” The tension between these two parallel traditions in scholarship on photography and cinema has been complicated by a third criterion, according to which the two media have been theorized: stillness/movement. If indexicality and stillness have been the two key concepts in photography scholarship, movement has played a similar structuring role in the case of cinema. And just as the two dichotomies undergirding photography and cinema scholarship—the indexical versus discursive nature of the photographic image, and the realist versus formative tendency in cinema—are increasingly losing their credibility and usefulness, the still/moving distinction has also been challenged by the proliferation of hybrid artistic practices. This article is organized around four categories: (1) photography and cinema in their relation to modernity, (2) debates on medium specificity and the challenge of the digital both to photography and cinema, (3) cinematic photography, and (4) photography and cinema as “spectral” media.","PeriodicalId":41388,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies","volume":"35 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73383109","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Eastern European Television","authors":"A. Imre","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0331","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0331","url":null,"abstract":"The field of television studies has given us a rich tapestry of the history and theory of the dominant commercial model that developed in the United States, and of the public broadcasting model that defined Western European television systems, through the 1980s. However, substantial work on the histories of Eastern European and (post)Soviet broadcasting has only appeared in English in the new millennium. To some extent, this absence of work on (post)socialist television has been due to a shortage of information about socialist cultures. Other reasons include television studies’ own identification of American TV as the normative path of the medium’s development, supported by a Cold War ideological filter toward (post)socialist cultures, which equated socialist TV with propaganda, as well as television’s status in Eastern Europe as a “lowly” popular medium not worthy of serious study. Recent publications have finally challenged the lingering stereotypes about socialist systems and introduced a different model of television into the study of the media. They have shown that, while socialist television systems varied significantly in terms of language, cultural tradition, political attitudes, and economic development, Eastern European and Soviet TV welcomed a range of innovative aesthetic practices and involved hybrid economic models. It fostered frequent exchanges and collaborations within the region and with Western media institutions, a programming flow across borders, a steady production of genre entertainment, in some cases significant reliance on commercial revenue, and transcultural reception practices along the shared broadcast signals of national borders. Rather than homogeneity and brainwashing, the history of Eastern European television shows affinity and collaboration with Western European public broadcasters; socialist party leaderships’ more or less haphazard attempts at control, which was constantly tempered by the demands of viewers to be entertained; the crucial role of competition as a driving force;, and experiments with various forms and genres in an effort to convey authenticity and persuasion. With transnational conglomerates’ rapid takeover of postsocialist media markets in the 1990s, and the accession of most former socialist states into the European Union in the mid-2000s, the story of Eastern European television has officially become a part of that of European TV and, more broadly, of the globalization of the media industries. What still justifies a regional approach are simultaneous political-economic developments that have once again shaped the region’s media in similar ways: after a short period of hard-fought reforms over media ownership and regulation in the 1990s, Europe’s financial crises in the late 2000s gravely affected postsocialist media economies and prepared television for a new type of re-centralization under the control of illiberal national oligarchies in coexistence with global neoliberal competition and con","PeriodicalId":41388,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies","volume":"29 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85480140","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Buffy the Vampire Slayer","authors":"Rhonda V. Wilcox","doi":"10.5040/9781849661409.ch-007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5040/9781849661409.ch-007","url":null,"abstract":"Buffy the Vampire Slayer is an American television series (1997–2003). Its first incarnation was as a movie (1992) that received mediocre reviews. The film’s writer, Joss Whedon, had the unexpected opportunity to transfer the work to television as part of the fledgling WB network. (Its last two seasons were on UPN.) The series soon garnered high critical praise and devoted viewers, though their numbers were only large in the context of a start-up network, where it was, however, allowed greater creative freedom. The show became culturally significant beyond its immediate fanbase. Buffy became famous for its gender politics: the main character reverses the usual horror trope of the young beauty killed by a monster. Buffy, whose slight stature belies her strength, derives from a long line of female Slayers, only one of whom exists in any generation. However, Buffy’s attractiveness comes in part from her flaws: she is constantly torn between her duties and her desire for a normal life. The California small-town setting suggests the darkness underlying suburbia: Sunnydale sits on a Hellmouth, where monsters converge. Each monstrous encounter is not only an adventure and a test of strength and ethics, but also symbolizes problems faced in reality, the “high school is hell” metaphor central to the show. Buffy is aided by a geeky but loyal boy, Xander; a shy computer whiz (and later witch), Willow; a book-smart mentor, Giles; a vampire seeking redemption, Angel (soon Buffy’s forbidden love); this group later expands to include others. A main theme is the idea of chosen family or working in community rather than fighting alone. Immediately admired for its witty dialogue (known as Buffyspeak or Slayer Slang), the show gradually explored more and more complex problems through building continuity of narrative, which reflects the classic hero’s journey but also involves many other storylines. Buffy is noteworthy for having the first long-running romance between two lesbian characters on network television; one of the two lovers is murdered, setting off a supernatural rampage by the survivor, Willow (and fan indignation). In the final episode Buffy shares her power around the world with Willow’s help. Buffy has a television spin-off, Angel (1999–2004) and continues in comic book form with Season Eight and more; some do not consider the comics canonical. Buffy spawned numerous online discussion forums. With its aesthetic and cultural value, Buffy has accrued more scholarly writing than any other television series.","PeriodicalId":41388,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies","volume":"7 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79928069","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Video Installation","authors":"J. Gosse","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0325","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0325","url":null,"abstract":"While at first, “video installation” would seem to refer to a particular medium and mode of display, in practice, the term is applied to a range of intersecting media, histories and genres, including but not limited to experimental and expanded cinema, video art, installation art, digital and new media art, and the emergent category of artists’ moving image. In short, “video installation” encompasses an expansive field of moving image practices, formats, and configurations, from multichannel film projection to video sculpture to immersive and interactive media environments. The term can apply to moving images that emanate from or are projected onto screens, monitors, or mobile devices, and are displayed in spaces outside of a conventional cinematic context. In terms of historical periodization, the rise of video installation coincided with the emergence of analog video technology in the mid- to late 1960s and the concomitant emergence of installation art during this same period. Up until the 1980s, video installation took shape predominantly as gallery-based displays of CRT monitors. Often configured into sculptural arrangements that self-reflexively acknowledge their physical support, “video sculptures” invoke and comment upon video’s genetic ties to broadcast television. Yet, other, more feedback-driven modes of installation, such as Nam June Paik’s TV-Buddha (1974) or Bruce Nauman’s Live-Taped Video Corridor (1970), emphasize the instantaneity of real-time closed circuit video over the sculptural presence of the monitor, and thus privilege surveillant over the televisual optics. By the 1990s, as video projectors improved in quality and decreased in cost, the bulky CRT gave way to the projected moving image, which in turn has emerged as a dominant mode within contemporary artistic production. Since it can adapt to a variety of spaces and surfaces—wall, ceiling, floor, screen, objects, even viewers’ bodies—projection opens up a multitude of experiential possibilities. Projection can also be sculptural, as in the work of Tony Oursler and Krystof Wodizcko, who generate uncannily embodied video portraits by projecting moving images onto free-standing objects, buildings, and monuments. Video projection can also be immersive or environmental, such as in Anthony McCall’s Solid Light Works (2005–2010), a suite of monumental, linear beams of white light projected into darkened gallery spaces, which act as updated, digital variations of his influential expanded cinema work, Line Describing a Cone (1973). In response to its dominant position within contemporary artistic practice, scholarship and criticism devoted to moving image installation, curation, and distribution have spiked since the 1990s. This bibliography offers a selection of relevant literature on this topic. Beginning with an overview of key scholarship on the history of video art and contemporary artists’ moving image, the bibliography transitions to more focused, thematic investigations of ","PeriodicalId":41388,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies","volume":"30 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81585915","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Lucrecia Martel","authors":"Deborah Martin","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0326","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0326","url":null,"abstract":"Lucrecia Martel (b. 1966) is one of the best-known contemporary Latin American filmmakers. She is an innovative stylist who has gained worldwide recognition for her strange, oneiric, and sensorial feature films, which have won prizes at film festivals around the world. Martel has been seen as part of the wave of aesthetic experimentalism and the shift away from previous forms of filmmaking in Argentina that came to be known in the early 2000s as the “New Argentine Cinema,” and early criticism of her work is often preoccupied with locating it within that trend, which was seen as intrinsically linked with the context of economic crisis in Argentina. Feminist perspectives on Martel’s work were also among the first writings on her, later followed by a number of queer readings of her work. In addition, because of its formal innovations, critics of Martel’s work have also paid sustained attention to aesthetic and cinematographic questions, especially around sound and the extra-visual senses, including touch and the haptic. Martel’s first three features—La ciénaga (2001), La niña santa (2004), and La mujer sin cabeza (2008)—are often referred to as the “Salta Trilogy” and depict the life of the conservative middle classes in the provincial setting of Salta, Northwest Argentina, where Martel grew up. They have been read as critiquing gender, sexual, ethnic, and class power structures, while questions of phenomenology, the body, the senses, and the use of sound have also been to the fore. The more recent Zama (2017) is a departure from the earlier features in a number of respects: it is Martel’s first literary adaptation (of Antonio di Benedetto’s 1956 novel of the same name), the first of her features not to be set in Salta, and the first to have a male protagonist. Set in the colonial era, it is also Martel’s first historical film. However, it shares certain aesthetic and thematic tendencies with the earlier films. In particular, early readings of Zama indicate that it will be read as an exploration of the colonial underpinnings of the racist, classist society examined in the earlier features. In addition, Martel has made a number of short films. Of these, Rey Muerto (1995) and Nueva Argirópolis (2010) have attracted the most critical attention.","PeriodicalId":41388,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies","volume":"123 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87312054","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Industrial, Educational, and Instructional Television and Video","authors":"Kit Hughes","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0327","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0327","url":null,"abstract":"For as long as television has been a darling of the commercial entertainment industries, it has been an object of interest for educators and businesses. The same can’t be said for media studies, which has long focused on the former mode—the domestic medium and the popular art—at the expense of the latter. This article corrals sources written in the 2010s from within the field, as well as research from scholars in education, sociology, management, and training. It begins with analyses of nontheatrical film used to train workers, educate students, promote capitalism, complete work processes, and other applications that television would take up beginning in the 1940s. It then addresses resources that would be equally helpful to scholars of educational and industrial television: useful television theory, archives, and trade publications. The remainder divides industrial and educational television into their own sections to allow for a more granular look at the key debates and practices articulated to each. Industrial television (ITV) comprises a wide range of uses. In the postwar era, goods producers used closed-circuit television (CCTV) to extend workers’ oversight of expanding manufacturing operations. Around the same time, larger corporations began experimenting with theater television for shareholder meetings and special training events. Videotape (1956) made television financially accessible for more companies that used the open-reel format for taped self-observation. The watershed moment for ITV was the introduction of the videocassette (the U-matic became available in 1971), which dramatically expanded both users and uses of the medium and supported an ITV-programming publishing industry. Eventually ITV—in the form of business satellite television (BTV, mid-1980s–1990s)—would provide national and international employers the capability to beam morale-boosting and informational messages to its employees in a period of globalization and worsening working conditions. Educators took advantage of many of these same televisual affordances, although to different ends. Resources here focus on educators’ experiments with novel modes of audiovisual pedagogy, as well as their attempts to bend CCTV, videotape, and broadcast to fulfill instructional needs and address crises in American public education, from teacher shortages to racialized inequalities. One of the major narrative arcs of educational television (ETV) is the battle for dedicated broadcast frequencies and the founding of American public broadcasting. Not only did these victories establish a foothold for educators within broadcasting (who continued to use the medium for direct instruction, though these applications were overwhelmed in the turn to broad cultural-uplift programming and funding shortages), they provoked debates over the capacity of commercial television to inform and educate. While PBS is well covered elsewhere, included here are sources that illustrate the contours of discussions","PeriodicalId":41388,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies","volume":"19 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82717514","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Television Music","authors":"Reba A. Wissner","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0324","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0324","url":null,"abstract":"The literature on television music has been gradually expanding since the earliest studies dating from the 1950s. Because of the medium’s infancy at this time, the literature was limited and only began to really blossom in the 1970s and 1980s. Studies on television music can be divided into four types: music in television shows; music on television, such as live music shows like American Idol and The Voice and opera on and for television; music for advertising, such as commercials; and music videos. The items in this bibliography will focus on only the first of the four types—music written for television series. Despite the growth in television music research, few sources are dedicated to only television music, but rather are joined with sources about film music, which has, in general, been more wide-ranging than television music studies. All of the sources on television music in this article were written in English, though there are other sources in languages such as French, German, Italian, and Spanish. More work on television music has been conducted in the second decade of the 21st century than ever before, with the demand for it in published research continually increasing. This bibliography contains the most influential sources concerning television music, from reference works to material on specialized areas. It will also consider blogs, which, now more than ever, form an increasingly useful platform for the publication of television music scholarship.","PeriodicalId":41388,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies","volume":"100 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-01-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77454504","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Television Authorship","authors":"Leora Hadas","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0323","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0323","url":null,"abstract":"Unlike the well-established tradition of auteurism in its sibling art cinema, in the case of television, the question of authorship continues to be fraught: subject to contestations not only over who can be called the television author but over whether that author exists at all. The heavily collaborative and standardized nature of most television production has been a long-standing issue for discussions of authorship, which have often argued that the concept is not useful for analyzing television—putting emphasis instead on the polysemic television text—or else focused on the struggle for control and agency between creative practitioners and television networks. Two main strands that coalesced early on in scholarship locate the television author either in the producer or the writer, with additional early work on directors mostly reaching a dead end. Over time, the focus has shifted to invest authorship in a hyphenate writer-producer figure, and in the late 2010s, both academic and popular criticism is often concerned with the figure of the showrunner. While not an official title credit, it is this figure of the individual seen as exercising full creative control of a show that is now often celebrated or indeed critiqued as television’s auteur. In the United States, the study of television authorship can be broadly mapped onto ideas of periodization in television and is bound up with issues of quality, cult, and artistic legitimation. Moments and figures of frequent interest to scholars are the anthology writers of the “golden age”; the late 1970s emergence of MTM and Norman Lear’s work with Tandem Productions as early birds of “quality” television, as well as ideas of studio authorship and company style; the appearance of the showrunner concept in the mid-1990s with Dick Wolf and cult showrunners such as Joss Whedon; and the auteurist branding of HBO from 1999 (The Sopranos) onward, leading into ideas of a “second golden age” led by the showrunner as auteur. Today’s “Peak TV” period is characterized by interest in the position of the author in transmedia television, in questions of representation and diversity in television production, and in the complex relationships between producers and audiences in a digital participatory culture. In the United Kingdom, in the meantime, much scholarship has centered on particular historical “playwrights” in the mold of Dennis Potter, and the question of television authorship is bound up with questions of literary adaptation and high and low culture. Changes in modes of production of television globally are now opening up the field to broader interest in television writers and producers as authors, but research is still scarce.","PeriodicalId":41388,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies","volume":"17 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-11-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88659339","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"AIDS in Film and Television","authors":"Kylo-Patrick R. Hart","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0322","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0322","url":null,"abstract":"Representations of AIDS in film and television have differed throughout the world. Accordingly, this article focuses primarily on such representations in North America, with a particular emphasis on US media offerings and occasional references to related examples from other English-speaking countries. In the early 1980s, what eventually became known as AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) was initially labeled GRID (gay-related immune deficiency). As a result, the earliest representations of AIDS in television news programs focused almost exclusively on gay men, and shortly thereafter intravenous drug users, as “guilty villains” in the emergent AIDS crisis, with a visual emphasis on emaciated individuals covered with Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions. By 1985, independent films and documentaries pertaining to AIDS started to emerge, along with the NBC network’s first made-for-television movie about AIDS, An Early Frost. In 1987, AIDS began entering the plots of various prime-time television series. Most of these offerings continued to perpetuate understandings of AIDS as a gay disease, even into the early 1990s. As the decade of the 1980s gave way to the 1990s, the phenomenon of AIDS was increasingly being regarded as two distinct yet interrelated epidemics: HIV and AIDS. Some film and television offerings began shifting their focus away from gay men and intravenous drug users with AIDS toward children with AIDS and healthy individuals with “at-risk bodies” that required ongoing protection. In 1993, Hollywood’s first all-star movie about AIDS, Philadelphia, flipped the script by foregrounding Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions to generate substantial compassion, rather than cultural contempt, for a gay man with AIDS. The film’s contents, viewed by a wider general public than preceding works, effectively challenged AIDS discrimination. During the first half of the 1990s, a small number of noteworthy AIDS metaphor movies were made and released, and self-representation in AIDS documentaries became more common. In large part due to the availability of lifesaving antiretrovirals, which resulted in a cultural shift from large numbers of individuals dying from AIDS to large numbers living with HIV, representations of HIV/AIDS in film and television decreased substantially during the second half of the 1990s and throughout the first decade of the new millennium. Since then, there has been a growing representational interest in exploring the early history of AIDS, in offerings such as How to Survive a Plague (2012), Dallas Buyers Club (2013), and The Normal Heart (2014).","PeriodicalId":41388,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81773823","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}