Università Roma Tre

The course wants to reflect on the visual culture of the new millennium, identifying some traces that interact each other and point out contemporary aesthetic experiments, both on the mainstream and on the “auteur” cinema. Categories, moreover, the Author and the “commercial” cinema which have been widely re-discussed. The course proposes, with a homage to a book by Umberto Eco published at the beginning of the 2000s, “six walks in the fountains of fiction”, six journeys in search of some clues capable of explaining the great revolution in action in visual arts, in a cinema increasingly “expanded” where old categories and classifications are less and less meaningful. Walk through the story woods, like the one of the protagonist Baltimore, the alcoholic and visionary writer of the latest Coppola’s film, walking in a wood filled with ghosts and writers. Vampyra encounters Edgar Allan Poe.

The “walks”:

1) Video game logic and contemporary post-media aesthetics

2) Jason Bourne’s aesthetics: intensified cinema, and the end of découpage

3) James Bond and the new auteur-hero.

4) The universe of surveillance. Jack Bauer and 24.

5) Neo-neo Baroque cinema complementary to a nostalgia for the analogue cinema

6) Digital-Resistance, Low Budget and Anti-System Cinema. The "out of the ordinary" film.

These trends, amongst the many strategies of the present, should be analyzed in the context of a more general gap between high definition and low definition, between mainstream cinema and “difficult film” , both characterized by an implosion of the narrative system and a desire for experimentation brought by both the modes of production and the cinematic texts.

The students are required to follow the projections of the Roma Tre Film Festival at the Palladium Theater.

Elio Ugenti, Immagini nella rete, Milano, Mimesis, 2016
Anthology of Selected essays