There is a deep and ambivalent connection uniting film with the collective memory. The connection tends to be little explored – certainly less than the link between television and memory – and yet it is decisive and rich in implications. This paper analyzes the nature of the relationship created in the course of the twentieth century between the cinema and the social processes of memory, one that goes quite beyond the placing of the past in discourse to affect the logics and the strategies of mnemonic narrative and the deep-seated mechanisms that govern the collective processes of remembering. Seen against this background, the home movie appears as an extraordinary example of meta-memorial construction, a valuable record for the reconstruction of the history of genealogy, but also a privileged point of observation for understanding the deep mechanisms at work in the coding of the past and the legacy of different kinds of knowledge on which the identity of a community is built.

The first signs that film studies were beginning to take an interest in analysis of the frames of cinematic vision came towards the end of the 70s. The revisionist trend emerging in the historical research tradition and the intensification of contacts with the cultural studies approach prompted an expansion of research perspectives, which now sought to include the context, i.e the situation, the set of conditions that mediate the encounter between the film and its viewer, within the list of subjects to be addressed. The essay traces the main lines along which this debate unfolded and the research activity conducted on the places of filmic vision, underlining the crucial nature of this aspect of research for an understanding both of the social and cultural functions of the medium and also of the forms and meanings assumed by the experience of viewing.

Numero tre del 2014 della rivista "Comunicazioni Sociali"

Numero uno del 2008 della rivista "Comunicazioni Sociali"