BOOK TALK: Border Mediascapes: Cinematic Itineraries at the Edge of Europe

Yale Italian Studies and Film and Media Studies are pleased to invite you to a book talk by Italian film and media scholar Francesco Zucconi, visiting Yale from the IUAV University of Venice on Friday, April 17 at 4pm in HQ 107. Prof. Zucconi will be presenting his new book Border Mediascapes: Cinematic Itineraries at the Edge of Europe, now out with the University of Minnesota Press. 

 

Examining a variety of documentary films made along the borders of Europe since the turn of the twenty-first century, Border Mediascapes takes a cinematic eye to the technologies employed in governing spatial movement. Working at the intersections of social sciences, political theory, contemporary media, and cinema aesthetics, this book expands our understanding of the border as not just a static political boundary inscribed on a map but a complex, dynamic network of human and nonhuman agents.

Francesco Zucconi asserts that contemporary borders are environments defined by media: a perpetually shifting set of interactions between physical bodies and sensors, surveillance cameras, satellites, mapping programs, digital signage, and cellular devices. Analyzing documentaries filmed by or in collaboration with migrants, Border Mediascapes demonstrates how cinema can be used to reveal the otherwise unseen apparatuses that facilitate systematized practices of recognition, expulsion, and erasure.

 

Francesco Zucconi is Associate Professor in Film and Visual Studies at the Università IUAV di Venezia, membre associé of the Centre d’Histoire et de Théorie des Arts of the EHESS of Paris, as well as research fellow at the Institut Convergences Migrations of Paris. Notable publications include La sopravvivenza delle immagini nel cinema. Archivio, montaggio, intermedialità (Mimesis 2013); Sensibilità e potere. Il cinema di Pablo Larraín (with Massimiliano Coviello, Pellegrini 2017); and Displacing Caravaggio: Art, Media, and Humanitarian Visual Culture (Palgrave Macmillan 2018).