Ivana Mette | Università Roma Tre | Italy
ivana.mette@uniroma3.it
September 15th 2022 | 16.30 – 18.15
Panel #5 | “De-Humanized Worlds”
Room G.127 | Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore Milan, Largo Gemelli 1
La terra dei figli. From the graphic novel to the movie. Dehumanization and reconfiguration of imaginaries and identities through landscapes
The intervention aims to address how La terra dei figli, a film by Claudio Cupellini (2021), based on the graphic novel of the same name by Gipi, proposes a dystopian representation of Italy in the near future, but temporally not well defined, in which the wandering becomes a key element in the search for the self and the definition of one's own identity. The dehumanization of humanity is carried out by man himself as a function of a reconfiguration of imaginaries and social fragility through the landscape, barren and swampy, where there’s a daily struggle for survival. A place where social practices and interpersonal relationships are rewritten and remedied according to the new world in which they have been placed, bringing with it a perennial echo of the past that influences the definition of the present and of individuals. The one of La Terra dei figli is an environment dominated by Augè's non-places, which relays us spectators to invisible beings, hurled against a muffled world that awakens our innermost anxieties of loss, emptiness and death and to which we can annex, albeit by mere helpless spectators, without cluttering up any visual space. Yet, in this experiential classism the value of the man-environment relationship is never eclipsed. Relying on what Bernardi stated (Bernardi S., 2002), in this specific case study, the landscape becomes, a real character, an interlocutor, often a ruthless antagonist towards the characters; it’s no longer a mirror of the soul, it’s no longer a space for action but, on the contrary, it often becomes a vast, opaque place in which the action and sometimes even the characters risk getting lost.
Ivana Mette is a PhD student in “Landscapes of the contemporary city. Policies, techniques and visual studies", Cinema and Visual Culture curriculum at Roma Tre University. Her study interests concern reception studies, neuroscience and cognitivism in cinema, but mainly virtual reality and its transmedia implications, with a focus on direction and storytelling in VR. She has published articles for magazines such as Imago - Studies of cinema and media. The title of the last one that it’s about to be published it’s Omar Rashid: nuove prospettive del cinema del reale e il concetto di autore nella Virtual Reality italiana.
