Örebro University

“Framing the Past: Weaving Memory and Experience into Historical Writing”.

Izabela A. Dahl is an associate professor and senior lecturer in history, affiliated with Örebro University and Södertörn University in Sweden. She studied and worked at several universities in Poland, Germany, Holland and Sweden.

Her main research interests concern modern and contemporary European history. Her research encopasses the fields of migration and refuge studies, humanitarian aid and relief activities, the history of anti-Semitism, Jewish history, European memory culture, and international relations in the Baltic Sea area, with special attention given to democratization processes.

Her analysis is driven by the interest in social power structures and social categorisations that pre-condition cultural and social contexts. Epistemologically, her work is inspired by discourse analysis, intersectionality, narrativity and the use of oral sources in history writing, as well as source pluralism. Approaches that are often applied in her investigated empirical studies include sensitivity to the gender dimension, processes of social inclusion and exclusion, and social categorization.

Universidad de Zaragoza

“Back in Ithaca: Mediterranean Stories and Film Spaces”

Celestino Deleyto is Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Zaragoza.

He has published widely on romantic comedy, film genre theory and history, transnational cinema and cosmopolitan film theory, including The Secret Life of Romantic Comedy (Manchester, 2009), Alejandro González Iñárritu, for the Contemporary Film Directors series (Illinois, 2010), co-written with María del Mar Azcona, and From Tinseltown to Bordertown: Los Angeles on Film (Wayne State, 2016). He has contributed to recently edited volumes on Pedro Almodóvar and Film Comedy for Wiley-Blackwell, and to the Film Genre Reader (ed. Barry Keith Grant) for The University of Texas Press, among many others. He has published his research in Cinema Journal, Screen, PostScript, Critical Survey and Film Criticism, among others.

His most recent work on transnational cinema and cosmopolitan theory has appeared in Transnational Screens, Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas and New Review of Film and Television Studies.

ABSTRACT

This talk offers a reading of the film Nostalgia (Mario Martone, 2022) as a Mediterranean narrative that draws much of its power from the use of location shooting in the Neapolitan neighbourhood of La Sanità. As in The Odyssey, one of the foundational Mediterranean narratives (Ruiz-Domènec, 2022), the hero returns home after a long time away, in this case forty years. What turns Homer’s poem into a central work of European and western culture is the journey—the “odyssey”—rather than the place where he is returning—Ithaca—, a meaning reinforced by Konstantinos Kaváfis’s famous poem “Ithaca” (1935) in which the Ionian island is openly described as no more than an excuse for the journey. In Nostalgia, on the other hand, the various journeys are only important in so far as they have shaped the identity of its protagonist, Felice (Pierfrancesco Favino), as a Mediterranean hero and as a personification of a cultural space shaped by a multitude of journeys, both individual and collective (Abulafia, 2014). The bulk of the the story, based on Ermanno Rea’s novel of the same title (2018), takes place in Naples, mostly in the Rione Sanità, whose history, urban a cultural identity, takes centre stage. This shift of perspective, from journey to destination, from narrative to space, conveys not only a quintessentially Mediterranean dynamic: a territory shaped, in the course of history, on the one hand, by constant human mobilities, encounters, clashes and fusions and, on the other, by places such as coastlines, islands, cities and borders. It also succinctly reminds us of the combination of plots and spaces that is at the heart of all stories.

My approach today is part of a project that explores the interface between film space and real places, in this case the Mediterranean Sea. My starting hypothesis is that the real world speaks to us through cinematic spaces, particularly in those films shot on location. Following insights by geographer Doreen Massey (2005), film theorist and historian Geoffrey Nowell Smith (2001) and the writing of director Mario Martone himself (2004), among others, I argue that while characters and plots have largely dominated the study of all narrative forms, including films, film space has been under-researched. The “spatial turn” that has, since the turn of the century, become visible in academia, provides a good opportunity to redress this balance, particularly since, as Mark Shiel asserts, film is first and foremost a “spatial system” (2001). The project from which today’s talk originates seeks, first, to highlight the centrality of space in the cinema, secondly, to argue for the proximity between cinematic space and the real world and, as a consequence, finally, to look at film space as an open window for spectators to access knowledge about the real places that films reveal to us.

References:

Abulafia, David 2014 (2011). The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean. Harmondworth: Penguin.

Martone, Mario 2004. Chiaroscuri: Scritti tra cinema e teatro. Ada di Adamo, ed. Milano: Bompiani Overlook, 2004.

Massey, Doreen 2005. For Space. London: Sage.

Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey 2001. In Shiel, Mark and Fitzmaurize, Tony, eds. Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context. Blackwell, 99-108.

Rea, Ermanno. Nostalgia. Fetrinelli, 2018.

Ruiz-Domènec, José Enrique, 2022. El sueño de Ulises: El Mediterráneo, de la guerra de Troya a las pateras, Taurus.

Shiel, Mark 2001. “Cinema and the City in History and Theory.” In Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurize, eds., 1-18.

Universität zu Köln

[TBC]