An American distribu- tor bought it, spent several million dollars promoting it, and it was a huge success in the United States, ending up on television there. What are generally recognized to be the major filoni were thus launched. Currently, the orthodoxy of treating the erotic as discourse rather than function is hegemonic in film stud- ies, but I shall briefly return to the point in Section 8 of this chapter.
The film represents the dialectic of the class struggle, which in its turn is one element of a dialectic between the popular culture celebrated by Gramsci, Pasolini and the Italian Communist Party and the capitalist industrial financing of the film, so that the financial strength of the American capitalist mass- culture industry, accustomed to handing down or selling to the masses a hegemonic ideology, might be used to send an art film that was also a truly popular film to wave the red flag in the American Mid-West. The film casts its historical material in an essentially family mould, a story of symbolic and emblematic relationships, so that it takes on the form of a saga of the rural peasant tradition, in which the leghe trade unions of the braccianti farm labourers of the Po Valley formed the vanguard of the socialist class struggle in Italy at the beginning of the century, all of this transmitted with the power of spectacle that the cinema can offer a popular audience, and with a rich rural popular iconography: We might question whether or not he has succeeded in all his aims.
Certainly in our sphere, the academic one, he has been criticized for historical inac- curacy, which is probably the least interesting perspective one could possibly take on that film. A reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement writes: I have a whole shelf of books in which scholars do much the same. That people enjoy watching James Bond films does not guarantee that the films deal with their concerns. I wonder whether two things are often being conflated: Let us take an analogy: Realist cinema in general, and neorealist cinema in particular, are examples of this approach.
Firstly, scholars fre- quently and repeatedly remark on the narrative shortcomings of these films: They are characterized by repetition of spectacle in a social situ- ation rather than by the coherent unfolding of narrative for individual comprehension. And these same features characterize some of the for- mula films produced by the Italian cinema industry since the Second World War: Elsewhere I have argued that the repetitive format met the need of the Italian cinema industry rapidly to increase its output in the absence of sufficient American product and surplus available creative talent Dario Argento recently informed us at a talk at the Italian Cultural Institute in London that he scripted three Spaghetti Westerns in as many months Wagstaff, Source for these data: Con un gesto imperioso del braccio faceva nascere attorno a Maciste, anche lui seminudo e con tortore in mano, un cerchio di lingue di fuoco.
Il neorealismo nasce, inconsciamente, come film dialettale; poi acquista coscienza nel vivo dei problemi umani e sociali della guerra e del dopoguerra. The Man with the Golden Touch Indiana University Press , La rivista cinematografica , Turin, 11 November , quoted in G. British Film Institute , Edinburgh University Press , 41— Lo spettacolo filmico in Italia — Rome: The Bioscope 23 and 30 December.
Rossellini Il mio metodo: Scritti e interviste, ed. Rubenstein eds , Art, Politics, Cinema: The Cineaste Interviews London: Pluto Press , — Cinema Paradiso and Mediterraneo won Oscars for best foreign language film and all the films found huge worldwide audiences. In terms of the sheer volume of people who saw and enjoyed them, these films represent some of the most popular Italian films ever. The very fact of their international success ensured they were read by some as art film, connected by associ- ation with the modernist Italian films of the s and s, screened in urban arthouses and enjoyed by those audiences interested in foreign cinema.
Their emphasis on visual style consolidates this generic loca- tion. Both textually and institutionally, the films hover between the arthouse and the popular. This tension, I will argue, opens up what I call the prettiness of Italian cinema. Two stories about reactions to Cinema Paradiso illustrate the germina- tion of my argument. As we waited in the ticket queue, she saw publicity stills and for a moment was convinced it was a black and white film to boot.
Of course, she loved the film. She still saw it as an art film; just one that was surprisingly enjoyable. Twenty years later, she contacted me on Facebook and wrote of how fondly she remembered that day and how much impact being taken to see Cinema Paradiso had had on her cultural formation. The second story is about the scholars of Italian cinema who have very kindly talked to me about my previous research on these films Galt, It is always nice to hear that someone has read your work, nicer still if they find something positive to say about it, yet I became fascinated by how often Italianists told me how ghastly they found the films I analysed.
Compliments on my argument were invariably hedged with outright disdain of its primary objects. I had repeated conversa- tions at conferences in which people apologized for articulating what they clearly felt was an insult to my terrible taste. My point in telling these stories is not to juxtapose demotic tastes with elitist academics, but to isolate how Cinema Paradiso and its ilk function as the wrong kind of generic mixture for the scholars, and the right kind for the audiences that made the films so successful.
These are fine subjects, but the obviousness of the opposition occludes something equally important: I call this mode the popular art film: Not exactly the same as the middlebrow, with its con- notations of a particularly classed version of serious culture, the popular art film is at once more debased in its melodramatic pleasures and more closely aligned to the international circuits of contemporary art cinema than the solidly national middlebrow.
Whereas the middlebrow often emphasizes markers of textual quality serious subject matter, treatment of social problems, literary adapta- tion , some of which can foreclose on international legibility, the popu- lar art film aligns a certain international art-cinematic style with generic narrative forms.
Thus, while part of what makes these films legible as art cinema to foreign spectators is their status as subtitled films, this is not the whole story. Conversely, some Italian films with similar generic markers and styles as the films I discuss do not gain international acclaim.
The popular art film has become a significant part of the global cinema landscape, providing a key means of access to international distribution for many producers, and, along- side festival prize-winners, forming the major destination for audiences of foreign films. Italian cinema, I would suggest, is a particularly useful case study for this mode of filmmaking. Italy has such a strong tradition of art cinema in the English-speaking world that its films are unlikely to provide the sense of discovery that a New New Wave like Romanian or Taiwanese film offers audiences.
We already know, or think we do, what Italian cinema looks like. It is therefore relatively difficult for new Italian art films to make a splash in the international marketplace. Thus, the popular art film has emerged as an important and recognizable niche for Italian cinema. Most of the Italian films that are seen internationally could be classified as popular art films: While the popular art film is an international form, I will argue that Italian cinema has a specific relationship to what I call the pretty, and that these contemporary films are only the latest iteration of the troublesome prettiness of Italian cinema.
We can trace anti-pretty thinking to the Platonic privileging of word over image, with the image at best a copy incapable of articulating philosophical reason and at worst a deceptive and dan- gerous cosmetic. Discourses of cinematic value implic- itly and sometimes explicitly build on these aesthetic ideas, rejecting feminized forms and decorative visual styles as politically reactionary or lacking substance.
Many kinds of film are dismissed as too pretty, but the popular art film is a particularly good fit: This discourse has a particular relevance to Italian cinema, which I think is uniquely concerned with aesthetics at the borders of the popular and art cinema. Contemporary films like Cinema Paradiso circulate as popular art films, but the relationship of these forms has a long history of defining Italian cinema to the world. We might think of the mythified shift from the white-telephone film to neorealism, long characterized as the defining moment for post-war Italian film culture.
This shift is centrally viewed as a transition from Fascist to anti-Fascist aesthetics and from commercial cinema to art film but, insofar as it figures a symbolic rather than literal overcoming of the past, it also posits a shift from pretty to anti-pretty film-making, from the decorative to the real. This defining moment of Italian national cinema is inscribed as a rejection of the pretty and a connection of that prettiness both to inferior popular forms and extreme political reaction.
The taint of this prettiness haunts Italian cinema in both its art-cinematic and popular forms. In what follows, I examine how the critical reception of Italian cinema has characterized films as pretty, drawing connections from the international response to canonical art cinema to that of more recent popular films. Prettiness as a critical problem The critical reception of Italian art cinema provides an insight into why and how the pretty becomes a problem.
In the art cinema of the s, visual asceticism often seems to be the mediator between humanistic realism and radical modernism. And yet, on the other hand, art cinema provides a space in which the cinematic image itself, with all its expressive potential, is of central importance. Italian art cinema thus builds a tension between valuing the aesthetic and valuing the anti-aesthetic. In this regime, ideas of the decorative are deployed to police the boundaries of acceptable artistry.
In contemporary film journals, Italian art cinema is often evaluated negatively via a vocabulary of decoration. Here the term refers to an over-composed view that subordinates serious meaning to pretty pictures. The historical picturesque is often seen as a debased landscape image, lacking both aesthetic depth and realist meaning. It is also associated with feminine taste. And just as picturesque painters were accused by post-war critics of veiling rural poverty Berger, This argument — that a picturesque, visually rich aesthetic undermines political critique — is one that recurs in much scholarship on historical films and in particular popular art film iterations of the genre.
More importantly, the suspicion with which even such canonical auteurs as these are met when their films look too visually composed tells us both how central prettiness is to Italian film history and how forcefully it was, nevertheless, denigrated. Despite these critiques of Italian art cinema as too pretty, much dis- cussion of more recent Italian film depends on a sense of its inferiority to the period of the modernist art film.
I find this type of critique to be a new iteration of anti-pretty rhetoric, this time locating the excluded pretty not in overly formalistic spectacle but in overly com- mercial spectacle; not in stories that are too beautiful to be political but in stories that are too sweet to be political. The terms of disapprobation have shifted slightly along with cinematic fashions, but the structuring aesthetic logic is exactly the same.
The feminizing rhetoric of passivity and sweetness should also be clear. Popular examples of this discourse include the stylized melodrama and cinema carino. Cinema carino is a term that emerges in the s and s to describe the turn away from overt political histories and towards smaller-scale, family stories. We can immediately see that the concept has much in common with the pretty. While most translations render cinema carino as cute cinema, carino can also be rendered in English as pretty. Either way, its associations are infantilizing and feminizing, an insignifi- cant kind of cinema in comparison with the heroic beauty or, better, heroic ugliness of a masculine cinema like neorealism.
The director has responded in interview by defending the value of an imaginative world in which a positive relationship is possible Sesti, More confrontational is Giuseppe Piccioni, a filmmaker who has been described in the Italian press as a standard-bearer for cinema carino. If the directors of cinema carino films feel the need to bite back at their critics, there is good reason. The questions posed to Piccioni and Archibugi exemplify a broad hostility to cinema carino. This dis- missal is typical. There are a whole series of anti- pretty ideas bundled up here.
First, cinema carino is associated with the feminine qualities of melodrama and sentiment, a reminder of the enormous success of Cinema Paradiso and the gall this success provoked in many Italian film scholars. Secondly, it is associated with the sur- face, a sense that their aesthetic qualities prove that the films are not serious, evoking a Platonic idea of the false cosmetic itself a gendered concept. Thirdly, there is a pervasive sense that what qualifies as depth is a particular kind of national truth, one that neither popular culture nor the feminine sphere of the family can access.
Laviosa tells us that cinema carino is seen as overly influenced by television style and overly concerned with the domestic. If s political cinema claimed moral depth by addressing serious public topics of history and politics, cinema carino could only gaze, like the television set, at the family in the pri- vacy of their living room.
Described in this way, the rejection of cinema carino seems evidently inadequate. How could critics dismiss films centring on melodrama or the familial, given the prominence of these modes and themes in Italian film history? In all these instances, the contrast is between earlier moments in post-war cinema which were political and good, and the present situation, which is carino and bad. However, since critics also condemned s and s films as too pretty, we can see that this discomfort is not solely a response to cultural change, but runs through the history of Italian cinema.
Moving on to the stylized melodramas that developed as a major feature of Italian cinema in the s, we see that these genres are not unconnected. William Hope describes a broad pattern in contem- porary Italian film of turning inwards, looking at small groups, fami- lies and individuals. Narratives of self-analysis are, for him, basically navel-gazing instead of addressing big social issues Hope, The critique of apolitical content is identical to that of cinema carino.
With cinema carino, these complaints are not usually connected to sty- listic excess but rather linked to a televisual aesthetic. With the stylized melodrama, the same complaint of inward-looking content is matched to a formal prettiness.
Instead of finding television to be a bad influence in creating a small-screen, talk- show aesthetic, the discourse on popular melodrama figures TV as the creator of a glossy advertorial style. The stylized melodrama becomes the new apolitical pretty — a kind of film that circulates successfully in the international market, but whose embellished style fails to live up to modernist standards of anti-pretty value. Examples of this style abound, and form a peculiarly Italian variant on the heritage film. And like Respiro, Hamam has attracted criticism on the basis of its decora- tive style.
Whereas there was a dramatic drop off in domestic cinema attendance and production in the s and early s, a gradual revival has been growing ever since. Variety reports that the Italian industry reached a ten-year high in , producing films. This history, then, is not only one of critical dismissal but of the nature of popularity. The rise of popular art film in the s marks an important shift in Italian film culture, even if many critics might view the films themselves as further evidence of decadent decline.
As a closing case study, I look at a film that combines aspects of the glossy melodrama and cinema carino, as well as prompting both international acclaim and anti-pretty critiques. Like many stylized melodramas, it features a child in its central role. Michele lives in a Southern village and, when out playing with friends, discovers a boy chained in a hole in the ground. The film thus offers both a focus on the familial and a political history; both the popular pleasures of a melo- drama told from the limited perspective of a child and an art-cinematic engagement with the Italian past.
Or, if you prefer, both a nostalgic landscape aimed at the international arthouse market and a thriller edged with national politics for the domestic audience. For many films, Berlin rep- resents art-cinematic credentials, and indeed Salvatores was nominated for a Golden Bear. Back in Italy, the film also fared well.
In March , it was in the domestic box office top ten for the month Screen, Most of the other top films were American: Just like the art films of an earlier era, mannerism is the downfall of the pretty film, updated with an explicit rejection of commercial spectacle. Mannerism shifts from being an aesthetic problem that refers only to art to one that refers purely to commerce. The pretty is here compared to an Oriental object: In an implicit denigration of these qualities, the lacquered surface is presented as too glossy and cosmetic to be taken seriously as cinema.
The film is certainly glossy. As Michele shuttles between his fam- ily in the village and the prisoner in the hole, we spend a lot of time looking at the wheat fields around his home Figure 3. These scenes provide plenty of opportunity for pretty compositions. The landscape scenes are shot with highly saturated colours, using filters and polariza- tion to emphasize the red tones in the field and sky.
This effect might remind us of pasta commercials, but we can also locate it in some other cinematic histories. Another aesthetic inter-text for these red-saturated tones is the look of Kodachrome Super-8 film, which the DP Italo Petriccione has cited as an inspiration Camera, This look, reminiscent of old home-movies, encodes nostalgia at a for- mal level, but it also references a material history of filmmaking that includes avant-garde evocations of emotion, nature and the profilmic. A similar approach was taken up by some of the Italian critics who, oddly enough, were most positive about the film.
This difference undercuts the commonplace that these popular art films are loved abroad but despised at home. In some ways the opposite is true. For the Anglophone critics, this wealth of reference could only indicate a promiscuous post-modernity, feeding into a commodi- fied spectacle, but I would suggest that we see in them the strategy of the popular art film, elaborating meanings that work in various formal registers and for disparate audiences. It is set in , the same year that Aldo Moro was assassinated and that kidnappings in Italy were at an all-time high.
Moreover, the pretty composi- tions also depict abandoned farmhouses and decaying ruined buildings Figure 3. Paul Sutton has argued that the film encodes the political history of the s in three registers: The familial politi- cal melodrama is a thriving variant of Italian popular art film. Instead of families we have crime families: But, like all irony, this representation is not a total rejection of its object. Both films find in their limited perspectives a mode of articulating Italian political history through the televisual, the melodramatic and the imagistic.
Its protagonist contemplates sexual and street revolution under a La Chinoise poster, a beauti- fully composed image that would no doubt continue the work of piss- ing off Jean-Luc Godard that Bertolucci began in The Conformist. Redrawing the Map New York: Film and the Decorative Image New York: University of Toronto Press. Guru Box Office Guru, http: Johns Hopkins University Press. Mojo Box Office Mojo, http: Schoonover eds , Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories New York: Oxford University Press , — Peter Lang , — As they carry on, the carriage careers its way along dusty roads, the young man tossed about in the back.
A man stands on the docks in New York reading a letter and as he does he sings out loud, to musical accompaniment, a song of his longing for Naples while he is in New York. When he sings of how his mother, even though he is away from home, still serves out a portion for him at dinner and covers the plate, there is a close-up of her doing so; when he sings of his daughter missing him, we see her crying in bed.
He ends the song singing with outstretched arms towards the camera, in a long shot against the Manhattan skyline. There is temporal-spatial dislocation: The logic of their appearance belongs to the variety structure of rivista. The — eponymous — song in Lacrime napulitane steers much closer to conventional narrative time and space. The shots of dinner being laid and of his daughter are entirely within the temporal conventions of mainstream cinema. There are though, even here, slightly more dislocated elements. The difference in the level of recording, of loudness and reverb, between singing and speech in the film is considerable, with no concern to modulate between the two modes and their implicit spaces of vocal delivery.
More striking is the letter he has in his hand. We have just seen his mother Pupella Maggio writing to him and the letter he is holding looks like one he has just received, yet what he sings is his words to his mother, eliding time and space through the force of a song. Both sequences, and the films to which they belong, foreground the songs, but the earlier film is much more promiscuous with regard to the relation of song to narrative time and space. I am suggesting that this is characteristic of much Italian cinema from the inception of sound to the s, in films that might be perceived as kinds of musical but just as readily as comedies or melodramas.
Although there are adaptations of forms in which enacted narrative is interspersed with songs that arise from it operetta, musicals notably the shows of Garinei and Giovannini , these were largely unsuccessful and forgot- ten. Although the songs do more or less emanate from what is going on in the story, there is, nonetheless, a sense of pervasiveness. This derives partly from the evident primacy of the song: It derives also from the idea of Naples as a place in which there is always singing. Two other forms provide models for a still more fluid handling of song.
Opera does not distinguish between spoken and sung narra- tive: Even the distinction between recitative and aria, while it demarcates a greater or lesser emphasis on imparting narrative information and melodic expressivity, also allows song and narrative to bleed into one another. Opera was, moreover, if not quite the popular art its anti-elitist adher- ents like to aver, at any rate in some measure the national music, famil- iar as part of the musical landscape.
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Sometimes the two are even fused. In Casa Ricordi, Verdi is seen composing I Lombardi alla prima crociata, often seen as prefiguring the Risorgimento, and there are shots of street fighting: The rivista aesthetic involves a loose structure alternation of musical, comic and speciality acts, chorus routines marking beginning, halfway mark and ending and may involve some stylistic consistency in set design, musical style, the dominance of particular stars , but it does not involve an overall narrative trajectory. Films based on rivista often on actual shows that had had a theatrical success , however, seldom simply reproduce this aesthetic.
There seems to be a felt need to provide nar- rative and it is the combination of the arbitrariness of rivista with the logic of narrative that produces effects of pervasiveness. However, each is given a kind of back-story, suggesting various kinds of ironic relation between the on- and offstage. Battaglia Carlo Crocolo , who portrays a cowardly soldier onstage, proves him- self a hero when called up in the First World War, counterpointed with the patriotic songs of the ongoing show. Veneziani Vittorio De Sica is a monologist working with his wife Anna Lea Padovani , who acts out the sentimental subjects of his recitations; offstage they squabble, because of his roving eye and his jealousy of her increasing greater stardom; they separate and he falls on hard times, his elegant recita- tions deemed hardly worthy even of provincial avanspettacoli.
Fregoli Alberto Sordi , a quick-change artiste based on an actual star of that name , uses his skills to despatch the four men courting Yvette Lauretta Masiero , the woman he desires, and winds up in her arms. A comic has his routine undermined by a Fascist censor both played by Renato Rascel and develops the visual and dancing humour for which Rascel was famous. Song occurs, centrally or incidentally, in all of these and the acts bleed into the story and vice versa. An attempt may be made to ground the presentation of the rivista elements into the time-space of the theatre in which they occur.
This doubtless springs in part from careless, cheap, opportunistic production circumstances, but it also accords with an aesthetic that is not concerned with spatial-temporal continuity but with variety and change. The weight and influence of the rivista aesthetic can be traced in a number of other related forms.
It formed the basis for a great deal of radio and television programming, and films based on them. As well as song, the show they do consists of dancing and a production number finale, both irrelevant to a radio broadcast: Live rivista also took place in cinemas in the form of the avanspettacolo, acts performed before the screening of a film permitting the thinking of the two forms together. Also important is the tradi- tion of the song contest, beginning in its modern commercial form in Piedigrotta on the outskirts of Naples in the late nineteenth century and then consolidated nationally since in the Sanremo festival a major event in the broadcasting year.
Unlike rivista, the contests consisted only of song, but they emphasized the primacy of song, its importance outside of narrative and its availability as a reference point for the audience for popular Italian cinema. To all of these forms that provide models of pervasiveness — both continuous and discontinuous — must be added the importance of dub- bing in Italian cinema. The voice thus does not belong ineluctably and intimately to the time and space of the body: One effect of all the above is a surprising tendency to drown singing out temporarily, to privilege other voices and spaces.
Yet it is not uncharacteristic of Italian cinema to seem to say that it is enough that the song is there — there is no need to focus on it. I want to explore what this makes possible through three contrasting films: Like many opera-based films, Ave Maria is a backstage story, play- ing on the parallels between onstage and offstage. He falls for it and in the process she genuinely falls in love with him.
However, he discovers the deceit without knowing of the change of heart. Horrified, she leaves the theatre and staggers away, the aria continuing at the same sound level, as full-on accompaniment to her distress. There is, then, a multiple play on the truth of opera: When Tino literally and metaphorically points the finger at Claudette, she clutches her throat in a moment of frozen horror. The throat is the site of the voice: Claudette is a singer and she is being condemned in song. Secondly, in La traviata, Violetta devel- ops tuberculosis after Rodolfo rejects her, an illness signalled especially in coughing.
In the last minutes of the film, Claudette is in hospital, ill and pallid with heartbreak but perhaps also tuberculosis. When she arrives she gazes towards him, as he performs for staff and patients against a radiant background Figures 4. Ave Maria proposes parallels between songs and plot situations, fused in the pathos of its denouement. See Naples and Die suggests a world which is from the start full of song. Wanda is rehearsing the song in a theatre. Marzi is dubbed, but the song is then played on the piano by the rehearsal pianist behind Marisa and Roberto squabbling as she thinks he is taking up with Marisa again and then whistled by Roberto as he starts to shave.
The song is ubiquitous, in the air, not belonging to anyone in particular and tangentially expressing the feelings of the person singing it perhaps Wanda fancies herself as a femme fatale, perhaps Roberto, a womanizer, does despise womankind. However, thereafter the song manages to remain somehow diegetic while yet doing narrational work: The looseness of song in relation to time and space in See Naples and Die is as nothing compared to the dazzling playfulness of Carosello napolitano. Although guided by the principle of variety, this has the overall structure of a very rough chronology of Neapolitan song.
The effect is ratcheted up one step more by the use of images of music as cultural production: All of this is dazzlingly mixed with a secure touch. Let me look at just two sequences from the long central segment, set before and during the First World War and focusing as all the segments do on an unhappy love story, here that between rising star Sisina Sophia Loren and strug- gling composer Luigi Giacomo Rondinella , separated first by her ambi- tious mother Dolores Palumbo and then by his death in the war.
There is an extreme close-up of Sisina — but here also surely we should say of Sophia — her eyes glistening, with a heav- enly choir over in other words, a pure movie moment. She is called onstage to take a bow with the other girls against a cheery patriotic tune — but the heavenly choir music continues over, her mood replac- ing musically that of the stage show. Here devices specific to cinema — the extreme close-up, the mismatch of diegetic image and non-diegetic music — are brought into play alongside theatre and photography.
None of the above is done in a spirit of foregrounding the device or self-reflexivity. The complex handling of song in Carosello napoletano only takes to an exceptional pitch of expression what is also found in Ave Maria and See Naples and Die and so much Italian film up to the s.
There was no lack of song after that, but the sense of pervasiveness falls away. The impact of Sanremo and the development of a hit parade gave rise to what became known as the musicarello, films built around and often named after a current hit. Because of the desire to reproduce the sound of pop there is sometimes a dramatic shift in the recording register between speech and song further emphasized by the fact that the star is often dubbed in their speaking parts ; occasionally this is acknowledged, in, say, a sudden cut to an extreme long shot to show the vast space the singer is filling e.
There are also a handful of later films with a more promiscuous approach: These, though, stand out as exceptions. One reason for the waning of pervasiveness is, as already mentioned, the importance of the singer doing his or her latest hit, bringing the voice and the body producing it closer together.
Another is the influence of classical Hollywood. A third is neorealism, which, for all its supposed decline, also provided a prestigious model for a naturalistic representa- tion of song. This may be per- ceived as in some sense more real, and yet the model of pervasiveness I have been trying to sketch remains true to the deeply rooted cultural traditions that gave rise to it opera, sceneggiata, rivista , not only their formal organization but even the less than focused attention of their audiences at least if those shown in films such as Ridi pagliaccio!
On the issue of the musical as a genre in Italian cinema, see Arcagni, ; and Marlow-Mann, See Marlow-Mann, , On the opera film, see Casadio, ; and Marlow-Mann, See Arcagni, for a more detailed account. On this in general, see Giraldi, Lancia and Melelli, For further examples, see my discussion of the use of Gianni Avolanti, announced as one of the attractions in Napoli eterna canzone and of Claudia Villa in the vehicle for him, Quanto sei bella Roma Dyer, See Bayman re.
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See Venturelli, ; Arcagni, ; and Marlow-Mann, The Pervasiveness of Song in Italian Cinema 81 Even in more sedate opera films, such as Ave Maria and Casta Diva , the audience is seen whispering and chatting during a performance, although this is not registered on the soundtrack. Il musical cinematografico italiano Alessandria: Edinburgh University Press , 80— Just as there are different languages, so are there other culturally dis- tinct ways of manifesting expressivity — an implication made repeatedly when it comes to describing the Italians. These ideas take us beyond aesthetics to popular behaviour, and to whole tra- ditions of display, performance, music, the demonstration of sentiment and emphasis, which are intimately linked to melodrama.
A problem lies, however, in maintaining such broad application of melodrama while sharpening and delineating its features. This task entails methodological problems of categorizing cultural form — namely, of avoiding establishing a set of pre-defined characteristics to which films must conform, whilst maintaining criteria through which to group them. Melodrama as a broad form Melodrama does not have one definitive form. It is found across high and low culture, in opera and theatre, novels, song, and painting, popu- lar presses and narrative cinema.
This mode is consti- tuted by patterns of rhythm, disruption, blockage and tension through which are dramatized the pathos of often everyday experiences of desire and frustration. Structuring this imagination is an individualized and expressive way of knowing, feeling and understand- ing which is particular to the bourgeois era. Surprisingly little consideration of the fundamentals of the form refers to any great degree to Italy.
This is especially so given that the heritage of public spec- tacle and musical drama — of Venetian carnival, Monteverdian opera or bel canto, of the theatrical aspects of Vatican Catholicism, court culture and mass political movements the wellsprings of the aforementioned imputed natural characteristics of Italians — could be placed as points of origin to a number of forms of melodrama. A similar-enough group of films, equally emotionalized and even more important to the post-war domestic box office, can be spotted in the variously termed strappalacrime tear-jerkers , larmoyants weepies , and neorealismo popolare popular neorealism practised by Raffaello Matarazzo amongst others.
Recent accounts of the way in which melodrama permeates Italian cinema have continued to take their focus from within the domestic confines of romantic entanglement, sometimes broadening the scope to make surprising inclusions such as the films of Antonioni for just one example of which, see Morreale, Such broadening, however, brings with it certain problems. Although the themes and set- tings that preoccupy a filmmaker like Antonioni are similarly personal and romantic to those of the domestic melodrama, the experience of time, drama and emotion in his films seems calculated to drain the events of any actual experience as melodramatic.
This chapter starts the other way round, from a sense of obviousness regarding melodrama, seeking ultimately to discern the melodramatic by joining questions of style and aesthetics to more general issues of dramatic worldview. And yet what can we suppose they meant by the word? In the first film, Aldo Fabrizi plays Peppino, a fishmonger in the eponymous Roman market square. He falls for a wealthy woman, Elsa, who leads him not only towards the high life but also into an illegal gambling ring, and after a police swoop on her home, he visits her in jail.
She approaches Peppino slowly, the prison walls bare but for thick shadows cast by bars. The orchestral score reaches a climactic cadence as the camera dollies up to her down-turned face. She glances slightly, which together with the camera movement and rising orchestral score suggests a brief glimmer contrasting to her general physicalization of defeat. Shadows pervade the cell as the couple begin to talk, and a plangent melody strikes up on solo violin as Elsa mentions that she has a young son. She relates the details haltingly, trembling over her words, before the nun interrupts as the music comes to a climax; being led away and on the other side of the bars which now cast their thickest shadows , the scene ends on her statement to Peppino of the name of the boy he has offered to shelter: A low-angle mid-shot frames Peppino within the door- frame, whose wooden immobility returns us to the theme of imprison- ment but now of the abandoned male within the isolation of the home.
In I vitelloni, however, it is one of a range of affective possibilities in a film whose tone changes in turn to mischief, bathos, comedy or wonder, each one like the charac- ters themselves never fully maturing. The examples from Campo show that one does not find melodrama simply in emotional excess, but in the exteriorization of the interior life of the protagonist, through an affective style which contrasts with the confinements at large within the dramatic world.
In I vitelloni, one can add that it is not character emotion alone that equals melodrama, but a particular artistic treatment of it. The drama opens on the secretly preg- nant Miss Mermaid winner Sandra, who faints as a storm breaks over her acceptance of the crown. Then Fausto sees his headscarved male friends outside laughing, which immediately undercuts the melodramatic moment by undermining seriousness. Both films also show how melodrama lies in the physical frustration of a partially expressed energy.
The sense of domestic blockage is made melodramatically evident: While the wire mesh of the beach and the bedroom frames that confine Olga and Alberto in I vitelloni Figure 5. This flow but also proximity is enabled in the for the characters all too often only ideal realms of the heterosexual family unit, outside of which lies only loneliness.
Structuring the conflicted position of the melodramatic protagonist are extremes, both of situation and in visual representation. When Alberto slumps into his armchair he plunges into the shadows that its arms create, with further shadows coming from the window too. Similarly in a later scene, when Fausto and Sandra cry together in the garden they are enveloped by the shadows of trees.
Darkness has deep symbolism in terms of mood, atmosphere, night, defeat, solitude, fear and death, but melodramatic lighting also works to create contrasts upon the human face. Such lighting privileges attention on intimate and personalized situations, and invites a reading of bodily, facial expressions of an unspecified but evidenced emotional life. Stylized, often extra-diegetic and obviously artificial lighting suggests realms that lie beyond the physical reality of the characters. This helps make defeated interiority visible, while melodramatic music renders it audible.
Both music and lighting — in fact, melodramatic style in gen- eral — exteriorize an emotionality privileged by the affective dimensions of film style within a dramatic world whose narrative elements only frustrate it. Although occurring in minor key, because remaining in affective realms beyond the diegesis, such stylistic factors place in an elevated sphere the one property — interiority — over which the most wretched retains dominion.
Melodrama typically expresses a sense of unfairness which is definitive of the popular experience of lack of power. In this situation, formal properties further emphasize the negative situation of the characters, and instead of offering a socially or diegetically realiz- able alternative, suggest fulfilment in realms that lie beyond the actual diegetic situation. These realms are made visible — although not realiz- able — in ways which sympathize with, and are ordered according to, the emotional lives of the outwardly defeated characters. Apart from immediate fear of her eventual attacker, Maria has little recognizable emotional life, because the melodrama lies in the way that such desolation is imbued with a sense of passage towards a beyond that is never glimpsed, yet is made present stylistically.
The family get work, and begin to make some progress on shovel- ling the swamp. Going through the swamp, and set apart from the rest, Maria starts to sing to the Madonna and a musical theme strikes up, making very few changes but continually moving from its home key towards a higher, unresolved but stable and tenuto pitch, giv- ing a notion of progress through tenacity and offering an affecting counterpoint to the grounding desolation of the vast landscape.
The ridge of water stretches far with a small patch of grassland across the horizon emphasizing the expanse of the sky, the passage thus being suggested as towards the heavens. There are no flowers, and of course no music in the actual diegesis after she sings her brief notes, but the presence of music on the sound- track gives an idea of the heaven which so animates her. This similarity between melodramatic film style and Catholic symbolism is made visual when we see the flowers and hear the music of an actual church service at a later point in the film.
The melodramatic lighting contrast here conveys an enveloping, infernal darkness save for Christ.
She smiles and turns her face to the light as a spike in the music indicates her death. Around Maria the candlelight casts soft shadows, maintaining a heavenly light on her face while the darkness creeps up her body, associating her sty- listically with the Christ seen at church. Melodrama is considered not to offer transcendence, because as mentioned with regards to the situ- ations of domestic frustration described above its characters are unable to break out of the restrictions placed upon them. Brooks concludes that melodrama offers the dramatic morality of the modern era: But key to the film, and to Italian melodrama more generally, is how states of humility, suffering and sacrifice link directly with emotional meanings and processes already central to Catholicism.
As with the previous films mentioned, the weakness and immobility of the main character forms part of a conflict between the facts of the narrative and the expressive properties of the filmic world. At the same time as this character immobility, however, the expressive prop- erties of the film style indicate realms beyond the narrative, which in this instance are those of the divine. It is in this space beyond the world of the film narrative that the strength and fulfilment of the weak lie.
Nowhere is this more evi- dent than in cineopera,9 films based in various ways on opera music and performance, and in which the divine aspect of the expressive realm is associated not as much with heaven but with artistic production itself. Melodrama as Seriousness 91 Casta diva , a late example from the heyday of cineopera, charts the life of Vincenzo Bellini and the development of his work through his unfulfilled relationship with Maddalena.
It inspires him to start playing piano, and his performance is intercut with shots of her eyes as she appears, from on high, at the top of the stairs. He tells his companions that he wishes he could create a poem, or a painting, so as to adequately convey her beauty, serving to confer on artistic creation the function of expressing a deeper because elevated — his music rises up to her — and affective truth than non- artistic reality can offer. Subsequently, los- ing Maddalena in his life leads to creative barrenness before the thought of her re-inspires the heights of feeling of his best music.
The film makes opera central to the melodramatic pathos of the romance between the two lovers; a point which is made overt when the two encounter each other later in an opera box during a perform- ance Figure 5. They grasp hands, holding tight within the box, their Figure 5. Their situa- tion gives a dramatic and personal meaning to the performance which is unwittingly appropriate to their situation. The couple complete their backstage embrace as the onstage aria ends.
The doomed lovers are also trapped within the trajectory of theatrical protagonists, the situation unyielding to their love whilst operatic traits — music, tableaux forma- tion, rooms that are occupied like stage sets — elevate the emotionality of the situation. The film ends, as grand opera conventionally does, on the death of the heroine. An icon of female weakness, Maddalena lies dying in bed, her faltering voice realizing her weakness as typically melodramatic physiology. The interplay of expressivity and expiration in her voice expresses as it does with the dying Maria in Heaven the status of the body as carrier — but a fatally weak one — of the strong emotions which are required of it.
The incorporation of operatic form into their relationship achieves, again, the melodramatic interplay of heightened expressivity and narrative restrictions mentioned in each of the previous films. Once again, the melodrama exists in how the emotional lives of the characters — and the affective dimensions of the drama — are fulfilled in the realms of artistic style but not in the facts of the diegesis, with those fulfilling realms being overtly connected in this instance to operatics.
Melodrama and the foregrounding of dramatic art Italian cinema is frequently referred to as operatic, and cineopera is merely the most overt expression of the operatic basis of melodramatic form in Italy. Its operatics can be found in the continual presence of music in melodrama, in staging which emphasizes exits and entrances, in immobility and tableaux, and the use of the human body and voice rather than of direct description as main vehicles for emotion which is extended across a halting of narrative progress — all chief characteristics of melodrama in Italian film more generally.
In short, melodrama displays itself as dramatic, and artists, artworks, performers, and particu- larly musicians, appear prominently in the world of melodrama while musical performance and love-letters proliferate. Romantic heroines are curiously susceptible to theatrical artifice: La portatrice di pane starts before the cred- its with a man who plays a music box walking past an advert for La Portreuse de pain the French play on which the film is based with the name of the author and main players. Such elements constitute a rec- ognition that the construction of romantic emotionality expresses real feeling, and gives pathos through the contrast of real life to that of the affective realms of fantasy.
And yet Italian cinema often combines pathos and action. This is fitting for the status of melodrama as drama strengthened, creating situations both of passion and activity. In fact, action is often achieved through simi- larly melodramatic techniques to the motors of pathos described above, as seen in the violent chase of Heaven over the Marshes: It is not either simply the expression of emotions, not even of those of disappointment, loss or romance. It must be conceived of these together with a particular stylistic approach and dramatic experience; namely, the creation of pathos within narrative restrictions, alongside the sug- gestion by the affective properties of the film of a sympathetic realm just beyond the diegesis.
Italian cinema used melodrama to treat subjects which are themselves taken seriously in wider society: Casa Ricordi , Romanticismo , and, both most famously and most critically, Senso. This seriousness belongs not only to the subjects treated, but is increased by cultural associations which privilege them as such: Melodrama is also used for rendering popular experiences of hope and unfairness, and does so by employing a series of recognizable symbols and configu- rations common to the wider culture.
It expresses a sense of society riven if not directly by class struggle, then by frustration with domes- tic and public structures in which, however, the characters retain faith as holding their only hope for fulfilment. Melodrama as Seriousness 95 Melodrama, as shown by the few examples given here, is found in contemporary and historical films, costume dramas, musicals, repre- sentations of the upper class, of hardship and of averageness. It goes beyond popular cinema and beyond the period under discussion here: This chapter began by characterizing melodrama as a sensibility whose prevalence in Italian cinema is in large part owed to the language it offers to express what can be described as the affective and dramatic qualities of seriousness.
So what happened to melodrama? As aforementioned, it cannot quite be stated that action stands opposed to melodrama in Italian cinema. Nor is it realism that counted out melodrama, for neorealism is shot through with moments of high melodrama. The form of melo- drama witnessed in this period is made untenable rather by a historic shift in the popular attitude to seriousness, a shift towards taking life and the world seriously that occurs contemporaneously to a more widespread decline of faith in a series of institutions: Its rejection of melodramatic seriousness can be seen in the lampoons of the melodrama that its often bleak subject-matter could have previ- ously pushed it towards: This chapter has not sought to deal with popular cinema by launch- ing a defence, nor a description of its pleasures for seriousness is not quite analagous to pleasure , nor an ingenious against-the-grain reading which aims to prove its subversiveness or deny its simplistic- ness for simplicity is a central achievement of popular culture.
The chapter has aimed rather to understand the overt and recurrent traits of a highly productive form.
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This productiveness has been analysed through the affective possibilities it enables, the dramatic worldview it constructs, and the role it allots culture within wider aspects of daily life. A category related to melodrama in a different context by R. Whose relationship to melodrama remains an issue worthy of further con- sideration. For general accounts of melodrama, see also the essays collected in Gledhill, ; Landy, Thereby leaving the equally massive question of silent melodrama, and the theatrical passion of the diva film, as part of a preceding tradition.
He finds that Fascist-era cinema avoided films based around feminized pathos before a turn to such issues in — i. For discussion of cineopera, see Arcagni, ; Casadio, Ich glaube nicht, dass sie die Technologie aufrechterhalten kann. Wieder einmal ein meisterlicher innenpolitischer Propagandaschachzug. Um auf ein anderes Thema zu kommen.
Aber noch einmal zu China. Ich glaube, in China sieht es momentan so aus: Werden die Herrschenden aber in der Lage sein, sich an dieses neue Umfeld anzupassen, indem sie neue Propagandamethoden ersinnen? Die Moral von der Geschichte: Kierkegaard lebte genau in der Zeit, die Habermas so preist: Ironischerweise ist das auch eines meiner Probleme mit dem wahllosen Charakter des digitalen Aktivismus: Die eine Frage lautet also: Und die zweite Frage ist: Muss es sich hierbei um eine Einzelperson handeln?
Wir wissen nicht, was sie dachte oder vorhatte. Aber ist das genug? Reicht es aus, so etwas wie das Kent-State-Massaker zu haben, bei dem die Nationalgarde auf unbewaffnete Antivietnamkriegsdemonstranten schoss, oder muss es ein Sacharow sein, also jemand, der sich selbst bewusst in Gefahr begibt, bevor diese Gefahr ihn wirklich ereilt? Man sitzt nicht einfach herum und wartet darauf, dass Volkswirtschaften zusammenbrechen. Ich stimme fast allem zu, was Sie soeben nahegelegt haben. Klingt gut, nicht wahr? Aber wenn man sich die Sache genauer anschaut, stellt man fest: So, wie viele im Ausland - dank acht Jahren George W.
Wir sind eine Partnerschaft mit Twitter eingegangen, und die Welt sollte das wissen! Is the Internet is a medium of emancipation and of revolution — or a tool of control and repression? Did Twitter and Facebook have stoke the flames of rebellion in Iran, or did they help the authorities unmask the rebels?
Annual edition on edge. How has the Internet and networked computers changed the way we think? At the core of the debate lies the question of the science historian George Dyson, "Is the price of machines that think, people who can no longer think? Some of the most important present-day scientists and authors are in Brockman's circle, and present their vision on Edge. We are printing the most interesting ones in this feature.
Literature consists of novels, sonnets, stories, short stories, odes, in short, of works, completed, followed by specific aesthetic and thematic aspects organized structures, their own laws, are understood only by itself and can also be reduced to nothing else. To their particular shape, these distinctive physiognomy, which arises from a specific language and from what language does this, it is to do any real writer.
This special physiognomy is different from all the literary journals and film templates that are otherwise staring them between two covers and Roman names. Evgeny Morozov holds that Twitter is a control tool of authoritarian regimes. Morozov pointed out that encouraging social networks like Twitter and Facebook, created points of control by the regime. Clay Shirky said then: I don't know if you've read Kierkegaard, but there are quite a few subtle undertones of Kierkegaard in my critique of Twitter-based activism.
Kierkegaard happened to live during the very times that were celebrated by Habermas: But Kiergeaard was growing increasingly concerned that there were too many opinions flowing around, that it was too easy to rally people behind an infinite number of shallow causes, that no one had strong commitment to anything. There was nothing that people could die for. Ironically, this is also one of my problems with the promiscuous nature of online activism: People don't remember clearly, or they die, or the questions die and new ones take their place.
Perhaps that explains why McEwan doesn't reach for pat answers in his own novels. In a Web forum, "What Will Change Everything," McEwan calls for the "full flourishing" of solar technology to replace oil as our primary energy source and repair the damage caused by global warming. He envisions the world's deserts blooming with solar towers that are as expressive of our aesthetic aspirations as medieval cathedrals once were. The plot of "Solar" involves the development of a process to simulate artificial photosynthesis as a cheap, clean energy alternative. McEwan is as much scientist as he is novelist, and in "Solar" he finds clever ways to articulate the breadth of the climate change debate, and what may be at stake.
Here's an issue that might not fade. The story McEwan tells in "Solar" is certainly not as hopeful or as inspiring as his personal views seem to promise. In fact, "Solar" is a dark and savagely funny book, a withering portrait of Michael Beard, the Nobel laureate behind the solar project. Now in his mids, Beard long ago lost the inspiration that fueled his prizewinning research. He's a scientist turned bureaucrat managing a research foundation. Obsessed with sex and food, he is more concerned with his dissolving fifth marriage than he is with innovative science or the condition of the planet.
Surface charm notwithstanding, Beard is totally repellent, so much so I found myself rooting for any sort of change, even climate change. An odd accident gives Beard the chance to take revenge on his unfaithful wife and her lovers, and incidentally redeem himself as a New Energy entrepreneur. The outlook is fairly bleak. Investors want assurance of "shareholder value" before they'll commit to the solar project.
Beard's new love interest demands commitment and children but refuses to think about global warming because "to take the matter seriously would be to think about it all the time," and the routines of daily life won't permit that. Beard's corruption may doom the solar project, but he excuses his sickness as a reflection of the planet's condition. He brushes aside his own dire predictions about global warming to embrace "a bit of nihilism. Lui, agente letterario specializzatosi nel fiutare i talenti scientifici, ha creato Edge, una sorta di fondazione virtuale, con sede in Internet www.
Brockman lancia un quesito e premi nobel, aspiranti premi nobel o comunque scienziati insigni e plurititolati danno la loro chiave di interpretazione sul tema. La terza cultura, Garzanti a comunicare con il vasto pubblico. Raccogliendo tutte le risposte, ecco riempite le pagine del libro: Insomma, non un vago senso di fiducia nel futuro, ma, tra fisici, biologi e psicologi, un titolato pool di tecnici che invitano scientificamente all'ottimismo, come a ricordare che non ci sono scuse: Bando ai catastrofismi e agli alibi. We tend to believe that destiny is not fixed and that all time past fades into oblivion, but can the movement be a mere illusion?
While this poetic statement still resonates in the room, Barbour and the journalist probably do not have any connection with their own selves a second ago. Barbour believes that people cannot capture time because it does not exist. The concept of a timeless universe is not only irresistibly attractive to a handful of scientists, but such a model may pave the way to explain many of the paradoxes that modern physics faces in explaining the universe. We tend to think and perceive time to be linear in nature, the course of which inevitably flows from past to future. This is not only a personal perception of all humans, but also the context in which classical mechanics analyzes all mathematical functions within the universe.
Without such a concept, ideas such as the principle of causality and our inability to be present simultaneously in two events would begin to be addressed from a completely different level. They all exist at the same time. Barbour thinks the concept of time might be similar to that of integers whole numbers. All numbers exist simultaneously, and it would be insensible to think that the number 1 exists before the number How do I remember what I ate for lunch? If the future is already there, why strive at all?
Such dilemmas have arisen from the illusory perception that time is fleeting, like water in a river. We can consider a timeless universe as a long vanilla custard, the center of which has been filled with chocolate for the whole length of the custard. Assuming that the chocolate in the center represents us, we would believe that our slice is the only one existing in the universe, and that the anterior and posterior slices exist as concepts only. This idea would sound ridiculous to an observer of the custard, who knows that all slices exist together. They still make up a structure. They are a block, a whole custard with no crumbs.
In a space of the cosmos, the future our future is already there, deployed, and every second of our past is also present, not as a memory but as a living present. The most painful thing to humans, like Eastern philosophies outline, would be to try to break the fixed mold. Most of us are deeply convinced that at an unconscious level, a great cosmic clock is ticking out every second of this huge space called the universe.
Even specialists who synchronize time in the world are aware that the world is handled by an arbitrarily stipulated ticking, as clocks are not able to measure time at all. They offer extraordinary opportunities for access to new information, but they have a social and cultural cost too high: Moving from page to screen paper we lose the ability to concentrate, we develop a more superficial way of thinking, we become people of pancakes, as the playwright Richard Foreman: Pausing to develop a deep analysis is becoming a thing unnatural.
Two years ago one of his essays, published by the magazine "The Atlantic" with the provocative title "Google is making us stupid? Carr, a scholar who has worked in business consulting and has directed a long time, "Harvard Business Review, was branded by the people of the web as an enemy of technology. I've always been a geek, not a technophobic. But my enthusiasm has gradually lessened with the discovery that, in addition to the advantages that are obvious to all, the network also brings us much less obvious disadvantages and for this the most dangerous.
Also because the effects are profound and permanent. It will be harder to treat in the same way The Shallows 'superficial: What the Internet is doing to our minds his new book that is already discussing when there are still more than two months of its publication in the U. Explains why in the same Carr: Over the past two years I have tried to go beyond the personal, examining the scientific evidence of how the Internet and social-as well as the earlier revolutions of the alphabet - have changed the intellectual history of mankind.
And how new technologies influence the structure of our brain even at the cellular level. What role is playing the school in this revolution? In reality, however, educators and even librarians are getting used to the idea that all the information and study materials can be distributed to students in digital form. From the economic point of view it certainly makes sense that it costs less.
But merely to fill the rooms of electronic systems is myopic. How do we teach McLuhan, the medium matters, and a lot. Without books is not only more difficult to concentrate, but we are driven to seek from time to time on the Internet the concepts learned to date and stored deep in our memory. The long-term memory loss is the greatest risk: The co-founder of "Wikipedia," Larry Sanger, acknowledges the risk of distraction,but the accusation of being too pessimistic, do not trust in man's ability to deal sensibly with the new possibilities offered by technologies which are, however, a large progress for humanity.
The exercise of freedom, Sanger says, requires responsibility, ability to focus on the problems and solve them. Even in the digital. I do not want controversy and I hope that Larry was right: I'm not a technological determinist. It is along this path, most of which are beyond our control. It happened in the past with the alphabet, or the introduction of printing. It happens, more so now with the Internet.
People tend not to exercise control and, perhaps because the interruptions and distractions on the Internet, bring the pieces of information interesting or just fun '. Google Here comes again They are our compulsive clicking at increasing advertising revenues. The last thing you may want a company like Google is that we become more reflective, that we focus more on a single source of information.
To support the thesis of the absolute freedom of the Net, without rules or education programs, are mostly liberals. With arguments that, at least in the United States, sometimes reminiscent of those used by libertarian conservatives weapons, against the constraints on the environment or the rules of nutrition education that could prevent epidemics of obesity and diabetes.
Google even raises, for now, great distrust. And indeed was so, it's been so long. But in recent years, much has changed since that means crowdsourcing ideas and free work for many companies operating on the Internet, social networks like Facebook that behave as landowners of the nineteenth century: It's time to start thinking.
E adesso la storia. Nella sua agenda non trovi romanzieri ma scienziati. Brockman li ha riuniti in una specie di club virtuale che ha chiamato Edge, con sede in Internet www. I ragazzi del club invece ci hanno pensato. Tutti vedono, a sorpresa, un futuro tendenzialmente pacifico, non violento. Biologia a parte, i ottimisti non sanno indicare nuovi paradigmi capaci di sostituire quelli che oggi appaiono logori. Colpo di scena finale: Nel gli amici di Brockman saranno altrettanto ottimisti? Se si sono pentiti, potranno consolarsi con la battuta del Nobel Niels Bohr: Um jeglichem Plagiatsvorwurf von vorneherein entgegenzutreten — auch weil das Thema durch die drohende Preisverleihung an einen mexikanischen Schwanzlurch auf der Leipziger Buchmesse gerade in den Medien hochgekocht wird — legen wir unsere Quellen gleich offen: Eine der Gemeinsamkeiten, die viele Befragte dem neuen Medium zuschreiben, scheint eine Art Grundrauschen zu sein.
Angefangen hat das alles ja schon mit dem Telefon, als jeder Anruf aufregend war und sofort beantwortet wurde. Dann galt es als Statussymbol, wenn das Telefon permanent klingelte, oft hatten Chefs mehr als einen Apparat auf dem Schreibtisch stehen — man war wichtig und bedeutend. Das galt so lange, bis die Mobiltelefone in Mode kamen. Jetzt scheint es mir, dass die Gesellschaft zweigeteilt ist: Sie sind von uns so abgelenkt, dass sie ihren eigenen Aufgaben nicht mehr nachkommen.
Sie verwahrlosen, jagen nicht mehr gemeinsam in der Gruppe, essen wenig und verhungern manchmal sogar. There are many wonderful ideas to glean from this incredible collection of essays, but I was especially interested in what the replies suggested for the future of journalism and — perhaps a separate issue — the future of journalists. The application of this analogy to journalism is obvious and, to varying degrees, the concept has already been put into practice. More generally, the surge in claims and opinions that now appear on the internet would seem, by sheer probability, to have increased the amount of accurate or useful information that is available to the public.
Attorney story, in which the work of amateur internet journalists has had beneficial consequences for society, there have been, one assumes, many more instances of misinformation, slander and inanity. There is also the problematic tendency of independent online publishers to redistribute professional content without compensating authors. In other words, critics argue that the internet threatens quality cultural content, including quality journalism, in two ways: This shock of inclusion, where professional media gives way to participation by two billion amateurs a threshold we will cross this year means that average quality of public thought has collapsed; when anyone can say anything any time, how could it not?
If all that happens from this influx of amateurs is the destruction of existing models for producing high-quality material, we would be at the beginning of another Dark Ages. So it falls to us to make sure that isn't all that happens. As ideas battle for survival, we become the arbiters of which ideas live and which ideas die. But weeding through them is cognitively demanding, and our minds may be ill-suited to the task. For every accepted piece of knowledge I find, there is within easy reach someone who challenges the fact.
Every fact has its anti-fact…I am less interested in Truth, with a capital T, and more interested in truths, plural. I feel the subjective has an important role in assembling the objective from many data points. Each week, we publish an extract from a book that is topical or of general interest. This Will Change Everything: What would your reply be to this question about change: A collection of short essays where imagination, ideas and propositions know no bounds. He says it with affection, an honorific won from my ability to make his phone read his e-mail.
A geek is not a nerd or, God forbid, a dweeb; nerds are smart and dweebs are socially incapable. A geek is obsessed and pulls things apart. Whether he puts them back together is immaterial, as is whether everyone else has left the room. But then a funny thing happened.
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The geeks grew up, and it wasn't so bad. The internet was a geek-hungry machine; it plucked the geek from in front of his ham radio and deposited him among sales and marketing staff, and sometimes even near girls. Several geeks became billionaires. It became possible to be a geek and something else, too. The data packed into the black boxes of our phones and web browsers reveal things about us, trails of where we have been and what we have desired.
We request that you stay in the room. If you're going to step out for a bit, maybe grab us a Coke. Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism", which looks at the influence Bucky Fuller had on a range of people, in particular Stewart Brand, who helped create first the hippie counterculture and the back to the land movement of the sixties and seventies, then later the cyberculture that grew up around the San Francisco bay area.
Brand maintained that given access to the information we need, humanity can make the world a better place. The Whole Earth Catalog magazine he founded was promoted as a "compendium of tools, texts and information" which sought to "catalyze the emergence of a realm of personal power" by making technology available to people eager to create sustainable communities.
About 40 years ago I wore a button that said, "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet? What did it do for us? The shift that has happened in 40 years which mainly has to do with climate change. Forty years ago, I could say in the Whole Earth Catalog, "we are as gods, we might as well get good at it". Photographs of earth from space had that god-like perspective.
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Starting from a book the other day, our readers "What is your most dangerous idea," he asked. Danger here of course mean, "kill the man, let's bomb bay" is not as murderous ideas. Objective existing economic, political, social, moral order and radical, surprising, memorization will lead to disruptive changes to the ideas put forth.
I've had an interesting collection in a bookstore Mumbai: According to what I am when I returned to Turkey in! In fact in the book "What's Your Dangerous Idea? Where the "dangerous ideas" and implied "murder, massacres, rape, robbery, such as" criminal actions in almost every period, and their planning is not sure. There is talk of a threat by intellectuals in the book: So, the question that a certain moral, social, political or cultural order will change our basic assumptions about life that will shake the ideas Let's say that as a result of scientific research who, what age would die to know we've become This knowledge was really nice to be in our resolve?
In this regard puzzle scientists who study would want to continue? Or as soon as possible discontinuation of funding for research would deal? In linea di massima gli scienziati sono inguaribili ottimisti, lo sguardo rivolto al futuro, certi in cuore di avere le idee giuste per mettere a posto due o tre cosette che non vanno o che ancora non si conoscono.
Il Saggiatore porta in libreria in questi giorni ragioni per essere ottimisti pagg. Un gruppo di scienziati risponde alla stessa domanda: Certo, ci sono alcune discrepanze. Affrontato da tutti i punti di vista. When you look at young people like the ones who grew up to blow up trains in Madrid in , carried out the slaughter on the London underground in , hoped to blast airliners out of the sky en route to the United States in and , and journeyed far to die killing infidels in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia; when you look at whom they idolize, how they organize, what bonds them and what drives them; then you see that what inspires the most lethal terrorists in the world today is not so much the Koran or religious teachings as a thrilling cause and call to action that promises glory and esteem in the eyes of friends, and through friends, eternal respect and remembrance in the wider world that they will never live to enjoy.
Our data show that most young people who join the jihad had a moderate and mostly secular education to begin with, rather than a radical religious one. And where in modern society do you find young people who hang on the words of older educators and "moderates"? Youth generally favors actions, not words, and challenge, not calm.
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That's a big reason so many who are bored, underemployed, overqualified, and underwhelmed by hopes for the future turn on to jihad with their friends. Jihad is an egalitarian, equal-opportunity employer at least for boys, but girls are web-surfing into the act: Anyone is welcome to try his hand at slicing off the head of Goliath with a paper cutter.
If we can discredit their vicious idols show how these bring murder and mayhem to their own people and give these youth new heroes who speak to their hopes rather than just to ours, then we've got a much better shot at slowing the spread of jihad to the next generation than we do just with bullets and bombs.
And if we can de-sensationalize terrorist actions, like suicide bombings, and reduce their fame don't help advertise them or broadcast our hysterical response, for publicity is the oxygen of terrorism , the thrill will die down.