Events

Photography, Film and Marginality in Italy: Three Case Studies, 1952-2010

Lecture by David Forgacs

Sud e magia by Ernesto De Martino, Milano: Feltrinelli, 1959

When:
Tuesday, May 4, 2010, 5:00pm - 5:00pm
Description:

NOTE LOCATION: This talk will take place at the Franke Institute, 1100 E. 57th Street, Seminar Room S-118.

Introduction by Noa Steimatsky, Department of Cinema and Media Studies

How do photography and film contribute to our view of marginal and subaltern social groups in Italy? Do even “sympathetic” images reproduce and reinforce their marginal status or are they able to question or challenge that status? How far have those on the margins been able to get access to means of representation and control images of themselves? This talk will consider these questions in relation to three cases: poor women in the rural South of Italy in the 1950s, patients in psychiatric hospitals in the 1970s, and migrants and asylum seekers since the 1990s.

David Forgacs researches on the cultural history of modern Italy. His most recent book is Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War (with Stephen Gundle), published in 2007 in English (Indiana University Press) and Italian (Il Mulino). Forthcoming is his Italy’s Margins (Cambridge University Press). He graduated from the University of Oxford in 1975 and took his doctorate at the Scuola Normale of Pisa in 1979. He has taught at the universities of Sussex, Cambridge, London and Rome. Since 1999 he has held at University College London the Chair of Italian, the oldest in Britain, first established in 1828. In 2006-2009 he was Research Professor in Modern Studies at the British School at Rome.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, and the Franke Institute.