Paesaggi del Sud

The investigation of the layering of symbolic places in Southern Italy and the way art has interpreted their history calls for studies on the relationship between discursive regimes and visual grammar of the cinema of Italy, also beyond the borders of Italy’s national production. Since the second half of the twentieth century, audiovisual commodities as well as practices of production and distribution have contributed to either disruptions or consolidations of spatial notions of Southern Italy – spatial notions that continue to define the relationship between the southern territory and Italian society. This line of research intends to focus on the role of cinematic imagery within the figurative palimpsest and the discursive infrastructure that define the porous notion of the ‘Meridione’ by asking what kind of image the depiction of this landscape conveys.
The project has achieved visibility beyond academic circles through the projection of the recently discovered film by avantgarde film-maker Jean Epstein La Montagne infidèle which documents the 1923 eruption of Mount Etna in Sicily. This event, which took place at the Casa del Cinema in Rome, was followed by the international workshop “Ways of Landscape: Jean Epstein’s Film Practice and Theory.”