Cinema and Visual Theory

The course aims to provide students with a general knowledge of the critical tools underlying filmology as understood in the frame of visual studies. Through the integration of methodologies such as semiotics, theory of photography, theory of the gaze, and film analysis, the course will favour the comprehension of the experience of vision created by cinema, between reality and representation, visible and invisible, animism and documentary. Moreover, it will allow the familiarization with a net of questions spanning from the ontology of the technical image to the theory of the dispositif and the apparatus, without forgetting the specificity of the filmic object, its language, and its mode of signification. Preserving this double focus, the course aims to offer critical tools to be reinvested in more advanced studies in image theory, in the places of cultural dissemination, and in all those contexts in which the understanding of the images and the cognitive potential of the technologies of the visible perform a crucial political role.

Knowledge and understanding
At the end of the course, students
- will have developed awareness of the language of images and master the main techniques of analysis of the photographic and filmic
- will be able to trace the image back to the gaze that gave it shape, by recognizing the aesthetic and ideological implications of the point of view
- will be able to frame the role of cinema among the dispositifs of modernity, and finally grasp its contemporary postmedial transformation

Ability to apply knowledge and understanding
At the end of the course, students are expected to be able to:
- put into practice the acquired tool and apply it to significant cases
- grasp the contextual elements related to the appearance of specific images
- build paths of film analysis which open themselves to the consideration of the visual culture to which artwork belongs
- recognize and assess the experimental forms, as well as the influence of film culture on the landscape of contemporary media art
- employ the notions and critical tools acquired in different professional contexts, such as education, research, and creative industries