For a long time, comparisons of cinema and photography have been predominantly a question of contrast, both of their forms and their ways of seeing. This special issue of Cinéma & Cie reverses the perspective, by addressing some of the fundamental spaces of convergence and coexistence betweenthe two languages. While they have always been somewhat present in the history of thetwo arts (not only in chronophotography, but also astronomic photography, photographic series, and still photography), the photocinematic forms have become particularly relevant in the archaeology of post-media culture that has characterised much scholarship lately. What tools should we employ to study these confluences today? Is it possible to perceive overlapping images also in strictly cinematic or photographic works? From this perspective, the special issue deals with borderline authors, such as Jeff Wall; post-filmic aesthetics, such as the cinematic tableau vivant and innovative examples of contemporary, experimental audiovisual production.

This book has been conceived from a series of speeches which took place during the Filmforum Festival of Udine and Gorizia whose main theme was the use of moving images in the space of contemporary art. The aim of this publication is to create a scientific framework of some of the most important artistic experiences: from the use of archive images to the newest participatory practices. The book consists of essays selected during the Filmforum Festival and the MAGIS International Film Studies Spring School and texts from invited researchers. It examines the ways in which the transient qualities of time have been used in contemporary moving images production and in their display.

Nihilism and/or community. The European matter. The gift of the in-common. Touching on different themes and authors, the papers presented here probe the prolificness that the terms sacred and community could have – if subtracted from the game of reactive nihilism – in checking the violence of the diverse political and religious ideologies that the West administers. An escape opens in the implementation of critical thinking and ethical behaviour that involve the “sacrifice” of thought and of the thinking subject. The disputing, therefore, of all the semantics of the logic of the recognition and the convenience that regulate life in advanced democracies.

The “birth” could be the main concept of a philosophy of the commencement: indeed it is not only a biological event or an effective metaphor for new beginning, but also the sign that being, knowledge and action, born themselves, have the power to give birth to something. Birth is essentially which has neither memory nor appropriation of itself: it’s a destiny and a choice that confirm the features of necessity and freedom bound in every coming into the world. Thoughts about birth can be found per exempla in Arendt’s, Nietzsche’s and Vico’s works as well as in the ancient and modern age, wherever the burden of the change has been felt. The concept of birth passes through the contemporary philosophy which wants to rebuild the historical framework of the critical reflection.

The aim of this collection of essays is to explore “negative characters” in espionnage narratives of some of the most esteemed English writers, such as Conrad, Maugham, Ambler, Greene, Fleming, MacEwan, among others. The role of women will be analysed, in particular with the figure of Mata Hari, so as to provide a gender perspective on women as villains and /or double agents. The relationship between literature and film studies will also be considered in a comparative approach.

This book is a theoretical essay that lays a few foundations on which to build an anthropology directly focusing on human units. In the first chapter, the author will attempt to show that the evolutionary specificity of humans constitutes an argument in favour of this perspective. The consciousness of existing in time and nuanced modalities of presence call for a detailed observation of humans. The second chapter is a critique of the abundant use of the notion of relations in social anthropology. It invites for the observation of individuals through successions of moments and situations. The third chapter concerns nonhumans, another major theme of contemporary anthropology. About this point, the author sees a certain debasement of the notion of existence and proposes a realist ontology, considering what does and does not exist, from the examples of divinities, animals and collective institutions.

As the institutionalization of the avant-garde took place, postmoderntheory both reacted to and helped create the forces that erodedreason and even taste, labelled them quaint in the name of apostmodern theory, at the same time that mass commodity form wasinscribing exchange value on all work of the imagination. In fact, thereality is that the system, the society of domination has enclosed discoursein such a way that, coupled to new social media and electronicplatforms, all radical, all working class or under class voices are prevetted or erased, and only the most craven corporate financializedkitsch is validated. The collusion of galleries, collectors and curators,following the model of studio film and network TV, has equated popularitywith quality. The problem then is to recuperate something of thelost radical conscience of art and culture. There is now an amnesiaabout the prehistory of society, of our own psyches, and of the imagination.The colonizing of consciousness has rendered the imaginationof the west atrophied and almost inert. All art is a recreationof our own psychic formation (mimesis) as well as being shaped byits ‘otherness’, by a purposelessness. All stories are crime stories,all stories are about exile, and all stories are about homesickness.And all art contains a narrative. For only by having no purpose canthe artwork posit the direction to which society must look to createan ‘other’ or elsewhere. To retain something of that utopian promisethat is foundational in culture. The world is being dis-enchanted. TheUtopian promise is not kept.

Since the early 1990s, the thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty has renewed exceptional interest, perceptible by the number of seminars and publications devoted to it and, even more, by the multiplication of university research who take aim. The philosophy of Merleau-Ponty has become almost classical, and its complexity and incompleteness justify an intense research activity constantly renewed. The magazine Chiasmi, founded in 1996 and publisheded every year, has the purpose to promote an ever finer and deeper knowledge of the French philosopher and to address a specific trend, particularly characterized by criticism of Husserl's transcendentalism, the rehabilitation of the constitutive dimension of the body itself and focus on the perceptual layer. In this perspective, the journal can accommodate articles on Husserl, Heidegger and Patocka, since they help to illuminate the heritage in which Merleau-Ponty is located. This issue pivots around three themes – namely the theoretical exchange between Merleau-Ponty and psychology, aesthetics and the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (this year is the tenth anniversary of his death) - each containing the contributions of scientists and internationally acclaimed experts, but also young researchers.

This book, which is an excerpt of the author’s Ph.D. dissertation, deals with the popular reception of early Italian television, during the years of the so-called “lungo miracolo” (1954-1969). To do so, the author focuses on the Catholic and Communist audiences’ perception of the first TV programs. The investigation into these two main groups’ reception is conducted through analysis of all TV references, tracked in the reader’s columns of the two most popular magazines of those years: the Catholic “Famiglia Cristiana” and the Communist “Vie Nuove”. The text ise introduced by a preface written by professor Stephen Gundle, one of the major experts on the circulation and reception of mass culture in modern Italy.

David Sylvian may be seen as a philosopher, accordingly to the postmodern spirit, who invalidates identity, while preserving it at the level of “non-sound”, in a troubled relationship between the ego and the others. His most recent songs have been analysed, as well as the lyrics and Sylvian’s way of life. Music is the goal of a path of self-realization, which brought Sylvian to conceive a new view of arrangement, increasingly deprived of its frills and capable of magnifying his voice, which that it is uncontainable. Sylvian shows everybody that silence may become an integral part of music towards nonsense, or the recovery of existential nudity.

Morphology is the general theory of form and formation, which can be seen as the innovative and fruitful point of intersection of the scientific and the humanistic cultures. The three papers presented in the book by Olaf Breidbach, Pietro Corvaja and Angelo Vianello respectively illustrate different features of morphology from the epistemic viewpoints of history of science, mathematics and biology. The texts were produced in the context of the second meeting of the “Centro Interdipartimentale di Morfologia F. Moiso”, which took place in Udine on 14 December 2007.

Among the various issues debated in philosophy today, this book focuses on one which is unquestionably central: can we claim to have any regulated procedure that uses common norms to resolve human disagreements? Although this is a question with profound classical roots, it is explored in this work through the prism of a key notion in today’s thought: controversy. The aim of adopting this approach is to determine whether controversies might constitute this regulated procedure. What are controversies? Are they only a type of reasoned and ordered debate? Are they a complex process of making or fixing rational beliefs? Each chapter of this book can be seen as a way of contributing to the analysis of human rationality, but viewed not so much as something unitary and pre-established that needs to be discovered, but rather as something that is neither unitary or pre-established; something that still needs to be achieved.

The images of atrocity, either analog or digital, are always the trace of an encounter between the gaze of a photographer or a cameraman and a human being suffering from the painful effects of man-made violence. The archive images resulting from such an encounter raise some inevitable questions: who took them and for what purpose? Is it possible to retrace the process that led to these shots? What do they hide behind what the eye can see? This special issue of Cinéma & Cie will not only focus on the production of such images, but also on their persistence on the synchronic level (in the media: newspapers, magazines, cinema, television, the Internet, museums…) as well as on the diachronic level (across time: mutation, re-editing, inversion…). From propaganda to counter-propaganda, from purposes of memory to artistic aims, the circulation of these images proves that repetition always implies difference.

A hypertextual guide to an uncharted Milan, the liveliest, expressed through features far from the media’s limelight. The Milan of places where independent and underground culture is produced, where new ways of life and socializing are experimented on a daily basis, with participation and dissemination of knowledge.A guide capable of, firstly, disassembling the numerous components of the urban framework to then give useful tips for an upstream, erratic journey full of surprise and emotion. 
 A topography of author itineraries between psyche and territory, narrative itineraries written by the best pens of Milan in a fun game of clues, links and chance, but also of new correlations in which the readers can become protagonists.The project, to which a multitude of researchers, artists, academics and professionals will take part, wants to contribute to the growth and enrichment of a different Milan, different from the one portrayed by the official signage.
 In addition, the Guide – with its website of interactive maps – allows all the realities involved to “trespass” their reference fields and interact with the other reported experiences.

The itineraries suggested in this book interrogate the ontological and metaphysical sense of aesthetic experience, understood as the primary experience, in which our complexity as human beings is invested by the world and manifests itself. Readers will find two different yet convergent intentions. The first, exquisitely ontologico-aesthetic, develops Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the flesh-element towards an ontology of virtuality, with the aim of understanding a new entity, neither properly living nor properly artificial, appearing on the background of being. The second, predominantly aesthetico-metaphysical, takes the entity’s force of being in the aesthetico-linguistic experience of deixis, and tries to show the work of the aesthetic logos as a condition of possibility for meta-empirical inference.working title

In 1963, Hanna Arendt published Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. This volume provoked a strong reaction throughout the Jewish community. The accusations that would arise involved Arendt’s portrayal of Eichmann, her analysis of the Jewish Council’s role, as well as her evaluation of the trial, judicial questions, political scopes and ethical aspects. By reconstructing this painful event that involves friendships and affection, the author analyses Arendt’s position with regard to questions of guilt, Law, collective justice and jurisdiction for crimes against humanity. Alongside this, he enquires into the ‘ambiguity’ of an institution like the Jewish Council and other central categories of Arendtian speculation, such as the incapacity to think and the ‘banality’ of evil.