G. (Giuseppe) Fidotta, PhD

At RUG

2022-2023

Film History (with Julian Hanich, Sergio Rigoletto, and Nico Medina Maranon) 

This course offers an overview of the global history of cinema from the 1890s to today through lectures, seminars, and screenings. The course deals with important periods, modes, styles, genres as well as production and exhibition practices. In addition to exploring the historical development of film, we will pay attention to how and to what ends one researches and writes film history.

Introduction to Audiovisual Arts (with Kristin McGee and Pieter Verstraete)

This course looks at recent transformations in the audiovisual arts as well as their related cultural industries. In particular, we examine the critical role that film, music, theatre, and video play in our increasingly interactive and global arts environment that has co-opted strategies of cultural resistance. In order to explore these transformations, the course is built around key concepts that help to discuss specific cases. 

The Geographies of Cinema: Scales, Flows, Networks (MA Seminar)

This course is designed to tackle cinema as a spatial practice and its constitution in relation to socioeconomic and geopolitical spaces. Although the interconnectedness of cinema and space has caught the attention of both film scholars and geographers since the early twentieth century, the recent shifts in film production, distribution, and consumption prompted by the digital revolution requires us to reckon with cinema’s new spatial identity in materially rooted terms.
Countering the idea of globalization as a totalizing and homogenizing force, this course aims at approaching cinema in light of the multidirectionality, unevenness, and multiplicity of coexisting, but not necessarily conflicting, networks and circulatory paths. To do so, we attend to the experience of making, watching, and studying movies across a variety of scales—global, regional, (trans)national, (trans)local—so as to to sketch the outlines of cinema’s (and film studies’) geographical imagination.
Cinema, as it has been recently observed, is an exemplary form through which to grasp the dialectic between our lived, conceived, and perceived worlds. This course examines how this is the case.