Anthropologies of Television

Screening of Andromeda, Luciana Fina, 2023, Portugal-Italy, 73’ and Un mito antropologico televisivo (An Anthropological Television Myth), Alessandro Gagliardo, Maria Helene Bertino, Dario Castelli, 2011, Italy, 54’.

Screening and talk with Luciana Fina and Alessandro Gagliardo moderate by Raquel Schefer

June 17th, 6pm

Rua Damasceno Monteiro, 12 r/c, 1170-112 Lisboa

Portuguese conversation

3rd floor, with stairs

Free entry

The fifth session of the programme “Amérika: Cinematographic Gestures to Reenchant the World” takes a detour, focusing on the history of Italian television through the filmographies of Luciana Fina and Alessandro Gagliardo. In “Andromeda”, Fina explores the passages between the installation and the cinematic spaces, along with the tensions between the television device and the cinematographic one. Articulating a set of archives produced by the Italian public television in the 1960s and 1970s with sequences recorded by the filmmaker, the feature focuses on “television as utopia” against the backdrop of the class struggle and the feminist struggle in post-war Italy. General history and visual and cultural history combine here with the sensory potencies of memory as Fina addresses the history of Italian public television reenacting a childhood episode. The technological specificities of 4 the television device acquire formal expression in the dialectic of sound and image, the openness of the film-object to the spectatorial sphere and the sophisticated approach to the relation between “champ”, “contrechamp” and a historical and utopian “hors champ”. In one of the sequences of “Andromeda”, Fina re-uses archives from a conversation between Adorno and Eco on Italian television in 1966, in which the German philosopher differentiates the emancipatory potential of the television device from its dominant ideological uses. “Un mito antropologico televisivo” operates precisely on deactivating the dominant functioning of television. Bringing together a set of archives from a local television station of Catania produced between 1991 and 1994, a period of disintegration of the post-war emancipation paradigm, ‘Un mito’ destructures discursive syntagms and ideological constructs through montage. In this way, it collectivises television archives, restoring them to common use, and points to the emancipatory potential of the technological device both in aesthetic and political terms.

‘Amérika: Gestos Cinematográficos para Reencantar o Mundo’ is a Research Program curated and mentored by Raquel Schefer.