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Global Media – Italian Cinema and the Ecological Imagination
145 001 | CCN: 25866
Location: Dwinelle 188
Date and Time: TU, TH 12:30pm - 1:59pm
4 Units
Understood, variously, as magical, dreamlike, a ghostly projection, ‘writing with light,’ moving images often appear to us as an ephemeral, immaterial form. And yet, cinematic production, distribution, and consumption have always relied upon natural resource extraction, petrochemicals, and biohazards that have lasting, material effects on the landscapes and bodies behind the scenes and projected onscreen. Cinema thus both makes and marks worlds, indelibly. This course explores a selection of films made in and around Italy beginning in the 1950s that engage the ecological imagination as they intersect with human and more-than-human worlds—from volcanoes to goat birth and death, from air pollution to toxic waste dumps. Films by: Vittorio De Seta, Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Gillo Pontecorvo, Alice Rorhwacher, Cecilia Mangini, Giovanna Taviani, and Michele Frammartino. Readings by: Erika Balsom, Laura Di Bianco, Nadia Bozak, Melody Jue, Elena Past, Karen Pinkus, and Monica Seger.