November 2016/ Keynote, Cinema and the Arts in Italy: Creativity, Conflict and Collaboration

On 25th November 2016 at 2pm at Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia, Clodagh Brook will be giving the keynote talk for the Conference, An Eye on Italy. This talk investigates how Italian cinema has collaborated with the arts, particular other visual arts, from the sixties through to our digital contemporaneity. Crossing boundaries between artistic disciplines has been variously described as “avant-garde”, “experimental”, “disruptive” even, for Roland Barthes, as “war”. However, by the 1960s, cinema was already a collaborative art, so was there still room for such experimentation? Where has cinema set its artistic boundaries? Are there players who defamiliarise the normality of cinema’s interartistic and intermedial collaboration? Taking mini case studies from Italy of the 1960s, 1980s and the 2010s, the talk focuses attention on individuals and groups who are actively engaged in disrupting boundaries and explores how institutions and technologies foster or hinder such disruption. In so doing, the talk will challenge and amend established ideas of cultural centres and peripheries.

Dr Brook will be giving a second talk at the conference in Australia, this time on, The Future of Italian Interdisciplinary and Visual Studies Teaching. This takes place on 26th November, 4.00-5.30pm