Angela Dalle Vacche – författare

Through metaphors and allusions to art, science, and religion, André Bazin's writings on the cinema explore a simple yet profound question: what is a human? For the famous French film critic, a human is simultaneously a rational animal and an irrational being. Bazin's idea of the cinema is a mind-machine where the ethical implications have priority over aesthetic issues. And in its ability to function as an art form for the masses, cinema is the only medium that can address an audience at the individual and community levels simultaneously-- the audience sees the same film, but each individual relates to the narrative in a different way. In principle, cinema can unsettle our routines in productive ways and expand our sense of belonging to a much larger picture.By arguing that this dissident Catholic's worldview is anti-anthropocentric, Angela Dalle Vacche concludes that André Bazin's idea of the cinema recapitulates the histories of biological evolution and modern technology inside our consciousness. Through the projection of recorded traces of the world onto a brain-like screen, the cinema can open viewers up to self-interrogation and empathy towards Otherness. Bazin was neither a spiritualist nor an animist or a pantheist, yet his film theory leads also to ideas of a more cosmological persuasion: through editing and camera movement, cinema explores our belonging to a vast universe that extends from the microbes of the microscope to the stars of the telescope. Such ideas of connectedness, coupled with Bazin's well-known emphasis of realism, form the foundation for his film theory's embrace of Italian neorealism. Choosing to avoid a quantitative naturalism based on accumulation of details, Bazin's theory instead promotes the kind of cinema that celebrates perceptual displacement, the objectification of human behavior, and one's own critical self-awareness.

Through metaphors and allusions to art, science, and religion, André Bazin's writings on the cinema explore a simple yet profound question: what is a human? For the famous French film critic, a human is simultaneously a rational animal and an irrational being. Bazin's idea of the cinema is a mind-machine where the ethical implications have priority over aesthetic issues. And in its ability to function as an art form for the masses, cinema is the only medium that can address an audience at the individual and community levels simultaneously-- the audience sees the same film, but each individual relates to the narrative in a different way. In principle, cinema can unsettle our routines in productive ways and expand our sense of belonging to a much larger picture.By arguing that this dissident Catholic's worldview is anti-anthropocentric, Angela Dalle Vacche concludes that André Bazin's idea of the cinema recapitulates the histories of biological evolution and modern technology inside our consciousness. Through the projection of recorded traces of the world onto a brain-like screen, the cinema can open viewers up to self-interrogation and empathy towards Otherness. Bazin was neither a spiritualist nor an animist or a pantheist, yet his film theory leads also to ideas of a more cosmological persuasion: through editing and camera movement, cinema explores our belonging to a vast universe that extends from the microbes of the microscope to the stars of the telescope. Such ideas of connectedness, coupled with Bazin's well-known emphasis of realism, form the foundation for his film theory's embrace of Italian neorealism. Choosing to avoid a quantitative naturalism based on accumulation of details, Bazin's theory instead promotes the kind of cinema that celebrates perceptual displacement, the objectification of human behavior, and one's own critical self-awareness.

In the footsteps of Andre Bazin, this anthology of 15 original essays argues that the photographic origin of twentieth-century cinema is anti-anthropocentric. Well aware that the twentieth century stands out as the only period in history with its own photographic film record for posterity, Angela Dalle Vacche has convened international scholars at The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, and asked them to rethink the history and theory of the cinema as a new model for the museum of the future.By exploring the art historical tropes of face and landscape, and key areas of film studies such as early cinema, Soviet film theory, documentary, the avant-garde and the newly-born genre of the museum film, this collection includes detailed discussions of installation art, and close analyses of media relations which range from dance to painting to performance art.Thanks to the title of Andre Malraux's famous project, Film, Art, New Media: Museum Without Walls? invites readers to reflect on the museum of the future, where twentieth-century cinema will play a pivotal role by interrogating the relation between art and science, technology and nature, from the side of photography in dialogue with digitalization.

The visual image is the common denominator of cinema and painting, and indeed many filmmakers have used the imagery of paintings to shape or enrich the meaning of their films. In this discerning new approach to cinema studies, Angela Dalle Vacche discusses how the use of pictorial sources in film enables eight filmmakers to comment on the interplay between the arts, on the dialectic of word and image, on the relationship between artistic creativity and sexual difference, and on the tension between tradition and modernity.Specifically, Dalle Vacche explores Jean-Luc Godard's iconophobia (Pierrot Le Fou) and Andrei Tarkovsky's iconophilia (Andrei Rubleov), Kenji Mizoguchi's split allegiances between East and West (Five Women around Utamaro), Michelangelo Antonioni's melodramatic sensibility (Red Desert), Eric Rohmer's project to convey interiority through images (The Marquise of O), F. W. Murnau's debt to Romantic landscape painting (Nosferatu), Vincente Minnelli's affinities with American Abstract Expressionism (An American in Paris), and Alain Cavalier's use of still life and the close-up to explore the realms of mysticism and femininity (ThÉrÈse).While addressing issues of influence and intentionality, Dalle Vacche concludes that intertextuality is central to an appreciation of the dialogical nature of the filmic medium, which, in appropriating or rejecting art history, defines itself in relation to national traditions and broadly shared visual cultures.

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic BookAs scientific discoveries and technological advances radically modernized Europe around the turn of the twentieth century, artists of all types began questioning what it means to be human in an increasingly mechanistic world. Animated by a luminous goddess at its center, the diva film provided a forum for denouncing social evils and exploring new models of behavior among the sexes. These melodramas of courtship, seduction, marriage, betrayal, abandonment, child custody, and public reputation, to mention only a few themes, offered women a vision of-if not always a realistic hope for-emancipation and self-discovery.In Diva, Angela Dalle Vacche offers the first authoritative study of this important "film" genre of the cinema that preceded the Great War of 1914-1918. She analyzes some seventy films, as well as the work of actresses such as Francesca Bertini, Lyda Borelli, and Pina Menichelli, to establish what the diva film contributed to the modernist development of the "new woman." Contrasting the Italian diva with the Hollywood vamp Theda Bara and the famous Danish star Asta Nielsen, Dalle Vacche shows how the diva oscillates between articulating Henri Bergson's vibrant life-force (Élan vital) and representing the suffering figure of the Catholic mater dolorosa.Taking readers on a fascinating tour that includes the Ballets Russes, orientalism, art nouveau, Futurism, fashion, prostitution, stunt women in the circus, aviation, anti-Semitism, colonialism, and censorship, Diva sheds important new light on the eccentric implantation of modernity in Italy, as well as on how, before World War I, the filmic image was associated with the powers of the occult and not with the Freudian unconscious, as has been argued until now.Accompanying the book: Diva DolorosaDutch filmmaker Peter Delpeut (Lyrical Nitrate) captures the spirit of the diva in this DVD of clips from early Italian films. Diva Dolorosa presents excerpts of fourteen films from the period 1914–1920, including Malombra, Rapsodia Satanica, and Il Fuoco. It features the work of actresses Lyda Borelli, Pina Menichelli, Francesca Bertini, Soava Gallone, and Elena Makowska.Diva Dolorosa is a Nederlands Filmmuseum production made in coproduction with VPRO television and in collaboration with Cineteca del Comune di Bologna. The DVD was produced by Zeitgeist Films, Ltd.

This is the first anthology devoted exclusively to the subject of colour in film and its history, production and technology.Set out in thematic sections, the book addresses key issues in the field including: the development of colour technologyhow visual stule was affected by the shift from black and white to colourcolour in film theory and the writings of authors such as Bresson, Eisenstein and Oshimacolour in the films of Godard, Hitchcock, Almodovar and many more.Including case studies too, this is the perfect introductory guide to a key element in film form and theory. A must for any student starting a film studies course.

This is the first anthology devoted exclusively to the subject of colour in film and its history, production and technology.Set out in thematic sections, the book addresses key issues in the field including: the development of colour technologyhow visual stule was affected by the shift from black and white to colourcolour in film theory and the writings of authors such as Bresson, Eisenstein and Oshimacolour in the films of Godard, Hitchcock, Almodovar and many more.Including case studies too, this is the perfect introductory guide to a key element in film form and theory. A must for any student starting a film studies course.

This rich, wide-ranging book explores Italy's national film style by relating it closely to politics and to the historicist thought of Croce, Gentile, and Gramsci. Here is a new kind of film history--a nonlinear, intertextual approach that confronts the total story of the growth of a national cinema while challenging the traditional formats of general histories and period studies. Examining Italian silent films of the fascist era through neorealism to modernist filmmaking after May 1968, Angela Dalle Vacche reveals opera and the commedia dell'arte to be the strongest influences. As she presents the whole history of Italian cinema from the standpoint of a dialectic between these two styles, she offers brilliant interpretations of individual films. The "body in the mirror" is the national self-image on the screen, which changes shape in response to historical and political context. To discover how the nation represents, understands, and recognizes this fictional "body," Dalle Vacche discusses changes in the strongest parameters of Italian cinema: allegory, spectacle, body, history, unity, and continuity.In her hands these concepts yield a wealth of insights for film scholars, art historians, political scientists, and those concerned with cultural studies in general, as well as for other educated readers interested in Italian cinema. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This rich, wide-ranging book explores Italy's national film style by relating it closely to politics and to the historicist thought of Croce, Gentile, and Gramsci. Here is a new kind of film history--a nonlinear, intertextual approach that confronts the total story of the growth of a national cinema while challenging the traditional formats of general histories and period studies. Examining Italian silent films of the fascist era through neorealism to modernist filmmaking after May 1968, Angela Dalle Vacche reveals opera and the commedia dell'arte to be the strongest influences. As she presents the whole history of Italian cinema from the standpoint of a dialectic between these two styles, she offers brilliant interpretations of individual films. The "body in the mirror" is the national self-image on the screen, which changes shape in response to historical and political context. To discover how the nation represents, understands, and recognizes this fictional "body," Dalle Vacche discusses changes in the strongest parameters of Italian cinema: allegory, spectacle, body, history, unity, and continuity.In her hands these concepts yield a wealth of insights for film scholars, art historians, political scientists, and those concerned with cultural studies in general, as well as for other educated readers interested in Italian cinema. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.